In the So-Called ‘Abortion Wars,’ Only One Side Is Murdering the Other
What makes Eichenwald’s “both sides do it” claim so strange is that his piece is actually a sustained and detailed attack on the anti-choice movement. He makes a forceful case that it lies about the safety of abortion in order to close clinics and doesn’t care if women die. He reminds readers that abortion is safer than childbirth and that women have abortions whether or not abortion is legal (before Roe, as he notes, American women had over 1 million abortions per year, about the same as now in a much smaller population). He claims almost nobody really believes that fertilized eggs are people, and argues for the abortion rights of rape victims by citing Judith Jarvis Thomson’s thought experiment in which a woman wakes up to find herself hooked up to a famous violinist who will die if she denies him the use of her body as a support system. He points out that most abortions happen in the first trimester, and only 1.5 percent after 21 weeks, although abortion opponents love to talk about the latter. By contrast, he makes no specific arguments against the pro-choice position. So where’s the “absolutism” on the abortion-rights side? Where’s the hypocrisy and the bumper-sticker logic? He never says.
Also SeeBut then, Eichenwald doesn’t seem to know much about the actually existing reproductive-rights movement. As if drawing a rabbit out of a hat, he points out that the majority of women (69 percent) who have abortions today are poor or low-income. This will come as a surprise to few people involved with supporting abortion rights and access—or who have spent an afternoon in a clinic waiting room. He notes that a study shows that three-quarters of women choosing abortion give finances as one reason (he skips over the study’s conclusion that typically women give multiple reasons, including responsibilities to others, lack of a partner and not being ready for motherhood). Since poverty is the cause, the way to end the abortion wars is for both sides to “put down their placards and open their wallets”—i.e., support laws and programs that will help poor women keep their pregnancies if they want them. “Here,” he writes, “are all the new costs”: an increase in the minimum wage, free government-funded daycare, free prenatal care, stronger legal protection for pregnant workers, and an end to the fight against Obamacare.
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