General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLet's reframe it: Keep Abortion Safe. Make it Accessible again.
Abortion is safe. It's one of the safest medical procedures. It's safer than childbirth.
Here is a good article from last August about why safe and rare is not a good pro-choice rallying cry:
<snip>
"Safe legal and rare" first became a pro-choice rallying cry during the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like even President Obama has called the mantra "the right formulation" on abortion. It's a "safe" pro-choice answer: to support abortion, but wish it wasn't necessary.
And it's a framing that Hillary Clinton perhaps the next president of the United States supports.
But "safe, legal and rare" is not a framework that supports women's health needs: it stigmatizes and endangers it.
In a 2010 research article, Dr Tracy Weitz, Director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that "rare suggests that abortion is happening more than it should, and that there are some conditions for which abortions should and should not occur".
<snip>
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/hillary-clinton-abortion-legal-but-rare
More:
http://www.bustle.com/articles/75548-whats-hillary-clintons-position-on-abortion-the-presidential-candidate-may-be-pro-choice-but-her-message-could
BTW, I'm not saying this to knock HRC. I've written OP's before on why I don't like the "safe, legal and rare mantra. Her positions on women's health are the right ones, and the only exception I've ever taken to her rhetoric is her saying that she could go along with bans on late term abortions as long as a woman's health is protected.
http://www.ontheissues.org/Cabinet/Hillary_Clinton_Abortion.htm
keep it up there
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)It was always code to suggest abortion is evil somehow. We know what people who think that really mean by "rare" -- they mean obstructed, burdened; put as far out of reach as possible.
Safe, legal, and ON DEMAND.