As a single pro-choice woman(pretty emphatically pro-choice, I'd say) I thought I knew a lot about abortion.I was even a Planned Parenthood volunteer for a while, but more the kind that calls donors than meets anti-choicers on the front lines. But, like a lot of pro-choice women who, maybe didn't make as much trouble as she should have, I ended up thinking bad things about "Women who use abortion as birth control" and I talked about the "Other life-saving services PP provides"(it does, and we should care about that, but maybe not as an apology for getting to make our own decisions about our bodies.) The amazing thing about this book is that it never apologizes for thinking that women and our dreams, which might include motherhood(Most women who have had abortions, contrary to the stereotype, have had at least one child) are important, so because of this book I'm going to drop the sadness behind phrases like "safe, legal, and rare" right now. How can something ever be truly rare, when, even in this age of galloping restrictions, one in three women experiences it? I also did not know that supporting a twenty-week abortion ban might mean that if a woman finds out there is something wrong with the fetus, she might not have time to make a decision before the ban would apply. When you read that such a ban does not seem like the "middle ground" some pundits hope for so ardently.
Pollitt suggests that it's lingering doubts about women's increasing power and shifting place in society that have caused the pro-choice movement to reframe the issue in such agonizing terms that the anti-choice side, despite smaller numbers, has really managed to control the debate.Sometimes, it seems like women can only keep our rights if we suffer for them.(I'm sure some people have regrets about shooting the burglar in their house, too, but that standard is not applied to gun rights. Maybe because that's a choice men can make?Judging women's choices sometimes seems like an unofficial national sport whether women have children or not(Think about something trivial like awards season.)
The humor in this book is trenchant and dark, as well as it should be, abortion rights are rolling back in alarming ways(Although if people didn't see it coming, I personally blame the pro-choice organizations for being so alarmist for so long that they became the girl who cried wolf...unfortunately now the wolf is here, will the villagers show up?