As Abortion Rights Shrink, What's the Best Language to Use to Protect Women's Options?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/activism/abortion-rights-shrink-whats-best-language-use-protect-womens-options



Across America, reproductive freedom is shrinking. Even with Alabama’s recent court victory protecting abortion rights in that deep red state, the overwhelming trend is very discouraging.

Red-state Republicans have shut down clinics in states like Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld protesters’ right to harass women going to clinics. State legislatures have enacted 21 new abortion restrictions so far this year. Worse yet, recent research has found that while many young women support the substance of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the right to end pregnancies, they are still apt to label themselves pro-life.

What’s going wrong? There’s no one answer. But a striking development is that the reproductive health movement is backing away from its longtime "pro-choice" label. Planned Parenthood has recently decided to drop it in favor of newer messaging that seeks to connect abortion with a wide range of women’s issues.

“The ‘pro-choice’ language doesn’t really resonate particularly with a lot of young women voters,” Planned Parenthood president Cecille Richards told the New York Times. “We’re really trying to focus on, what are the real things you’re going to lose? Sometimes that’s rights. Sometimes that’s economic or access to health care for you or for your kids.”

[DiverDave]

1. How about:

It's none of your god damned business?

Works for me.

[HereSince1628]

2. Yes, getting a message that addresses the problem is important.

Struggling to stay positive, and the use of ambiguous terms hasn't produced a sharp edged contrast that has the moral suasion to overcome the anti-abortionists' most resonant charge: abortion ends a life.

IMO, whatever message is adopted it needs to achieve recognition as a moral counter-point to the anti-abortionists' position. I don't think that can found in legalistic parsing that de-personalizes/dehumanizes zygotes, embryos, fetuses etc. Such arguments are attempts to work around the issue of taking a human life by defining away the humanness of developing life. It hasn't been convincing to many outside the pro-Choice movement.

For a long time my position has been that "self-defense" is a phrase that should be associated with abortion rights. It's a phrase that has the moral suasion to make acceptable the ending of a life, and it is well understood by the public and within American law. But using it to support abortion rights requires embracing the notion that abortion of a pregnancy terminates a life.

Moving toward a position that names the costs of unwanted pregnancies is a step in the right direction. It seems to me that those costs are what in the end will make terminating a developing life justified and acceptable.