On Americans and abortion

Perhaps just as important, the pro-life movement got very shrewd about its politics, realizing that it had a highly conflicted electorate on its hands. As William Saletan shows with depressing cogency in Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, the pro-choice movement was never going to win its case on the basis of women’s rights. Men, especially southern white men, didn’t care. The most persuasive argument it had was an old American standby: The government has no right meddling in your business. It didn’t take long for the pro-life movement to use this argument to its own advantage, realizing that if the public didn’t like the government making decisions about abortions, it could force pro-choice legislators to admit that the public wouldn’t like the government funding them either. They were right.

From Jennifer Senior The Abortion Distortion: Just how pro-choice is America, really?

The pro-choice version of this argument is: why should we be okay with government effectively forcing women to give birth to children they are unable to or unwilling to care for? The sad truth is that abortion — or the desire for it — is a part of life that exists in just about every society. Banning it won’t change that fact. Women should not have to risk illness or death because they do not want to give birth under harrowing circumstances. And the women mentioned in Senior’s piece are in some harrowing circumstances.