Like many Kossacks, I wish I could find common ground with anti-choicers. Surely, we can work together to bring down the number of abortions? We must have that desire in common, mustn’t we? My years of experience dealing with anti-choicers and their own statements say that we really don’t. And nowhere does it become more clear than we get down to nitty-gritty of how to reduce those numbers.
The pro-choice perspective is pragmatic:
People have sex.
Sex can result in unwanted pregnancies unless reliable birth control is used correctly every time.
Unwanted pregnancies are often terminated by abortion.
The way to prevent abortion is by preventing unwanted pregnancies.
Preaching abstinence hasn’t worked during the centuries it has been tried. Comprehensive sex education including information on contraception DOES work, as does the wide availability of cheap and reliable birth control.
Evangelicals look at it very differently. And Most anti-choicers tend to be religiously conservative, like evangelicals, and come to their stance on abortion through their faith. Logic doesn’t move them. The Bible does.
Unwanted pregnancies are the result of people having sinful sex outside the bonds of marriage in defiance of God’s law.
Giving people information on how to avoid pregnancy and STDs encourages more sinful sex, not less, so such information is undesirable even if it would lead to a decrease in unwanted pregnancies.
Unwanted pregnancies are often terminated by abortion, which is murder and a huge sin.
The way to prevent those unwanted pregnancies which are aborted is to prevent sinful sex outside marriage.
I would like to point out that their reasoning is faulty. Married women have abortions too. Sometimes they can’t afford another child. Sometimes they have all the children they desire. Sometimes they just can’t face another pregnancy or it threatens their health, though not their life.
We want to end unwanted pregnancies. They want to end sexual sin. We want to make all pregnancies planned and wanted, not unhappy accidents. They want to make sure that no one has sex before they are married. And just because we accept the reality of non-marital sex, doesn’t mean we encourage promiscuity or think that fifteen-year-old having sex is a terrific idea. We simply want to prevent the consequences of that sex whenever possible.
Time again, this dichotomy has recurred whenever pro-choicers, who have been working diligently since Roe became the law, to reduce the number of abortion through education and making birth control available, have attempted to work together with their-anti-choice counterparts on this issue. Democrats For Life refused to back a bill which would have allotted significant funds to attempts o reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and thus, the number of abortions. The Reducing the Need For Abortion Initiative, aka the Ryan-DeLauro Bill, contained provisions for funding family planning and comprehensive sex ed, both which the group opposes. In fact one of the members specifically said the bill would encourage pre-marital sex, and that abstinence-only sex ed was the way to go. Many, like Sarah Palin, want abortion banned even in cases of rape or incest—the fetus, they say is innocent. But even those who would permit abortions for the victims of rape or incest, still agree with the Democrats For Life when it comes to prevention of abortion.
As Frederick Clarkson and moiv have pointed out,even Jim Wallis, who is widely admired by many here (although not by me), agrees with them He says that Democrats should include reducing the number of abortions as part of the party platform (SURPRISE! It was already part of it).
"Abortion reduction should be a central Democratic Party plank in this election," Wallis told ABC News. "I'll just say that flat out.
http://www.salon.com/...
Sounds good, huh? A prominent minister is on our side, right?
Not so fast. Turns out what he means by it, and what we mean by it are rather different. The group he heads, Sojourners does not include making contraception more available as part of its strategy to reduce the number of abortions. Moreover, while he doesn’t like comprehensive sex education either.
In his attempts to seek "common ground" with others, Wallis focuses on the "too many abortions" argument. But his common ground is very shaky. It does not, for example, include contraception. Wallis has said he is in favor of contraception, but after a fairly extensive review of his writing and transcripts of speeches and sermons, I can find no reference to contraception as a common-ground means of reducing abortion rates. Wallis' common ground is abstinence-focused sex education, adoption reform (with no specifics on what kind of reform he thinks would lead to a significant number of women choosing to give birth and then give up their babies for adoption), and better economic benefits and social support for pregnant women to encourage them to continue their pregnancies.
Wallis is now out of the closet. He supports "reasonable restrictions" on legal abortion. Which ones, and how many, are unclear. Does he support a cutoff of federal Medicaid funds for poor women's abortions? Second-trimester abortions only when the pregnancies are likely to result in severe and long-lasting health consequences for the women or in dead children? Mandated scripts that lie about fetal development and the health consequences of abortion? Restrictions on access for adolescents unless their parents give consent? Waiting periods that make it hard for working women to get to clinics the several times required to prove they have "thought through" their decisions? Every restriction currently on the books adversely affects the poor women he claims to care about so much.
http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/...
This is Jim Wallis we’re talking about, considered by many to be moderate to progressive on many issues. But when it comes to preventing pregnancy, the mask is stripped away. His solutions are precisely the same as those of James Dobson and Pat Robertson and every other right-wing Christian preacher: abstinence only sex ed, keeping contraception out of the hands of potential sinners, adoption reform. Like those same preachers he believes that Ignorance Equals Innocence.
I have news for him. Sexual ignorance all too often equals unwanted parenthood for a girl who is too young and far more likely to raise her child in poverty because only 1% of teen mothers finish college by age 30.
I will repeat it: Ignorance Does Not Equal Innocence.
It never has, and it never will—or their would never have been an unwanted pregnancy in the last 2,000 years.
You can only work with people who are actually committed to the same cause. Most evangelicals aren’t. They want to stop sin,. We want to prevent pregnancy.
I’ll give you an example closer to home Not toologn ago someone calling herself marysia showed on DKos, claiming to be pro-life but certain we could find common ground. Problem was, when you want to her site where she supposedly tried to provide information for women who wanted to prevent pregnancy or were in the middle of a cris, it became very clear that her stated goal wasn’t born out by the information contained there. Yes, she provide links to a tiny number of sites that did give info on contraception—but her emphasis was on Natural Family Planning and abstinence. She pushed those two much harder than realistic methods. As for crisis pregnancy, her only links were interesting. One was to a site which not only was anti-choice but also regarded birth control as anathema. The other was to a crisis pregnancy center whose NY branch was investigated by the AG for fraudulent advertising and coercive tactics. There was NO Link to Planned parenthood, one of the best=known, and most reliable sources of contraception in this country—because a small amount of the services it provides—less than 5%--are abortions. When this was pointed out to her, she said she would not link to any group which did abortions, which left her with....right-wing coercive crisis pregnancy centers as the solution. In other words, as usual, ideological purity trumped any desire to cooperate. And she was far more liberal than Wallis, because she didn’t completely oppose comprehensive sex ed and contraception, though she heavily favored abstinence and NFP and adoption.
We can only bend so far, fellow Kossacks, without breaking. And if "finding common ground" requires us to even more narrowly restrict abortions and give up on the two things proven to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies—comprehensive sex ed and widely available and affordable contraception for every woman—than the cost is too high.
I, for one, am tired of bowing to other people’s religious beliefs. I respect those beliefs, and would never attempt to argue an evangelical woman into an abortion. Nor would I tell her lies about the dangers of pregnancy (as they do about abortion, claiming it increases the risk of breast cancer and the probability of long-term mental health problems, both of which have been debunked by research. I would not encourage an evangelical teen to have sex before marriage. I respect their beliefs. I only wish they’d return the favor. I’ll work with them when they are truly willing to give a little—instead of insisting it must be their way or they’ll take their marbles(and votes) and stalk off in a large cream-colored fundamentalist/evangelical Christian huff. Until that happens, they are part of the problem, not the solution.