Abortion Rights Without Apology

Katha Pollitt has a fantastic looking new book about abortion rights coming out. This, in turn, has led to some excellent writing from Laurie Abraham, Hanna Rosin, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Jill Filipovic. I liked Rosin’s open in particular:

I had an abortion. I was not in a libertine college-girl phase, although frankly it’s none of your business. I was already a mother of two, which puts me in the majority of American women who have abortions. Six out of 10 are mothers, which makes sense, because a mother could not fool herself into believing that having another baby was no big deal.

I start the story this way because Katha Pollitt, author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, would want it this way. In fact any woman who’s reading this piece and has had an abortion, or any man who has supported one, should go in the comments section and do the same thing, until there are so many accounts that the statement loses its shock value. Because frankly, in 2014, it should be no big deal that in a movie a young woman has an abortion and it’s no big deal. We shouldn’t need a book explaining why abortion rights are important. We should be over that by now.

Much more of this, please. Nuts to the “we should perhaps reluctantly make abortion legal but let’s all admit that it’s icky and immoral” arguments from the Saletans and McArdles. Women should not be required to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, women should not have to navigate an arbitrary obstacle course before having an abortion, these rights should not require any apology or tut-tutting about individual choices, and legal abortion is a positive social good. The end.