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JEFF9K

(1,935 posts)
Fri Oct 10, 2014, 01:50 PM Oct 2014

Our Founding Fathers were Pro-Choice!


On Wednesday's Diane Rehm show, on NPR, Katha Pollitt discussed her new book "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights," wherein she writes about the history of abortion rights in America.

It was surprising to learn that until after the Civil War, abortion was pretty much legal throughout the country.

Pollitt says that pro-choice forces need to reframe the debate and stop using defensive stigmatizing language when talking about it.

Here is a link to the transcript.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-10-08/katha-pollitt-pro-reclaiming-abortion-rights/transcript
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Our Founding Fathers were Pro-Choice! (Original Post) JEFF9K Oct 2014 OP
Fascinating stuff Prophet 451 Oct 2014 #1
If your catchphrase can be interpreted differently and you have to explain it, you should at least PeaceNikki Oct 2014 #2
Fair point Prophet 451 Oct 2014 #4
yup. PeaceNikki Oct 2014 #5
Thank you for posting this - I agree 100%! PeaceNikki Oct 2014 #3

Prophet 451

(9,796 posts)
1. Fascinating stuff
Fri Oct 10, 2014, 02:01 PM
Oct 2014

Not sure I agree with all of it. I use the term "safe, legal and rare" to mean "in an ideal world, there would be easily available contraceptives so abortion wasn't necessary" and I think that's how most of us use the phrase because in the end, prevention is always going to be better than cure.

PeaceNikki

(27,985 posts)
2. If your catchphrase can be interpreted differently and you have to explain it, you should at least
Fri Oct 10, 2014, 02:03 PM
Oct 2014

consider re-working or dropping it. The Democratic Party platform did so years ago.

Prophet 451

(9,796 posts)
4. Fair point
Fri Oct 10, 2014, 02:09 PM
Oct 2014

Although I wasn't aware the platform had dropped it.

How about "I'm for making contraception free and easily available"?

PeaceNikki

(27,985 posts)
5. yup.
Fri Oct 10, 2014, 02:31 PM
Oct 2014
http://thecoathangerproject.blogspot.com/2008/08/reclaiming-morality-of-abortion-and.html

Reclaiming the morality of abortion and the overdue change to the Democratic platform.
YAY!

By Linda Hirshman
Slate

The Democratic Party platform of 2008 finally dropped its old abortion language ("safe, legal and rare&quot , which had asked that women not have abortions unless they absolutely must. The 2008 platform, just announced, says instead, "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right." Should a woman desire to bear her child, the Dems advocate prenatal care, income support, and adoption programs to help her there, too. But in the world of the new Democratic platform, it's the woman's decision to make.

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled by a margin of 7-2 in Roe v. Wade that women—not their husbands, their doctors, or their legislatures—must be the ones to decide whether to bear or beget a child. Edward Lazarus, who clerked for the author of that opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun, called the decision "the Emancipation Proclamation for American women." But if Roe was Emancipation, the past three decades have felt like the Jim Crow South. Unable to repeal the decision itself, opponents made abortion as illegitimate as possible. The Hyde Amendment pulled Medicaid financing for the poorest and most desperate women. In 1992, the Clinton campaign reframed abortion as an unpleasant last resort. Last term, the Supreme Court finally broke, affirming the criminalization of certain late-term abortions. And Democratic candidate Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, compared women's regrets over their past abortions to white people's regrets about past bigotry. This Clintonian compromise—that abortion was a necessary moral evil—had become the most progressives could hope for.


Liberals have never won anything by reframing moral questions as pragmatic ones; they end up looking shifty and evasive. Whatever else it has been doing, the Supreme Court has always framed its decisions about the legality of abortion in moral terms. The decision in Roe to protect women's reproductive choices grew out of earlier cases protecting ordinary means of birth control as a matter of "privacy." It was only over the course of its long philosophical evolution on abortion that the court silently changed the meaning of privacy from the morally neutral secrecy to autonomy, a moral claim for the individual's right to shape her own life.


More at link.
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