OK. How about "safe, legal and SECONDARY TO BIRTH CONTROL?"

[PeaceNikki]

13. nope. still none of anyone else's business why a woman needs to terminate.

Over half of the women who have abortions were using birth control. Look, it's entirely possible to focus on preventing unwanted pregnancies without the judgment that abortions are 'evil' or 'bad'. This judgement is harmful to people who have abortions and clinicians who perform them.

Change the narrative. Anything else still stigmatizes women's health care choices.

Abortion is a moral & positive choice that liberates women, saves lives, & protects families.

http://www.ansirh.org/_documents/library/weitz_jwh10-2010.pdf

The opening paragraph:

Abortion is the most contested social issue of our time. 1 Recent events, including the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, and the fight over health care reform, demonstrate the intense polarization of the ongoing debate over abortion. 2 This article examines how the desire to find an end to the abortion wars led to the widespread adoption of the rhetorical mantra that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” By tracing the history and consequences of this paradoxical position, this paper provides insight into the intractability of the abortion conflict in the United States. The paper begins with a review of the transition from libratory to consolatory language regarding the role of abortion in society. I then argue that women’s health and well-being are harmed when desires to resolve the social conflict over abortion are prioritized over women’s need for abortion. Additionally, the adoption of the mantra that abortion should be rare increases the stigma associated with abortion. I demonstrate how focusing on making abortion rare reduces access to care and sets up unrealistic goals related to the number of abortions that should occur in the United States.

For those who don’t have time to read it, the main points are:

- By saying that you want abortion to be “rare,” you’re passing a negative judgement on the people who perform abortions and the women who have them. This judgement is harmful to people who have abortions and clinicians who perform them.
- Saying that you want abortion to be rare implies that there is something wrong with abortion, that abortion is somehow different from other parts of health care.
- Wanting abortion to be rare suggests that training clinicians to provide abortions is unnecessary. In reality, we need more abortion providers to increase access to safe abortion care.
- The “rare” framework legitimizes the need for abortion restrictions, and these anti-abortion laws have the most dire consequences for people with the least resources.
- The “rare” framing sets up the unrealistic expectation that there’s a magic number of abortions that are acceptable, and once we reach that number, abortion will cease to be a divisive issue in American culture.

As Dr. Weitz puts it, saying that we want abortion to be rare “does not achieve the underlying goal of reducing the social conflict over abortion and has real consequences for women’s health and well-being, including reducing access to care, increasing stigma, justifying restrictions, and establishing unattainable goals.”