Hillary Clinton Answer On Abortion Leaves 'Pro-Life' Senator Speechless

[Luminous Animal]

31. I hate it. It prioritizes abortion as a political issue over the health and needs of women.

First and foremost the desire to make abortion “rare” creates an im- mediate normative judgment about abortion. While a major piece of art may be “rare” and thus even more valued, such is not the meaning in this case. Rather “rare” suggests that abortion is happening more than it should, and that there are some conditions for which abortions should and should not occur. It separates good abortions from bad abortions. It creates an under- standing that women’s individual decision making is somehow responsible for the violent disruptive social conflict over abortion in the United States. The general sentiment is that if women were just more responsible we as a nation would be less polarized over abortion. In an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “This Is the Way the Culture Wars End,” liberal columnist William Saletan explained this location of blame: “This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation—and the subsequent killing, through abortion—of a developing human being.”13

Such individualization of responsibility is harmful to women. Abortion is currently one of the most stigmatized events in a woman’s life and the widespread endorsement of “rare” both produces and reproduces this stigma.14 A recent review of mental health and abortion found profound psychological implications of stigma. According to experimental studies stigmatization can create negative cognitions, emotions, and behavioral reactions that can adversely affect social, psychological, and biological functioning. Societal stigma is seen as particularly pernicious because it leads to internalized stigma in which women adopt the negative societal beliefs and stereotypes about themselves.15

The inherent delegitimization of abortion in the call for it to be “rare” was pointed out early on by a conservative anti-abortion blogger “[T]he phrase actually brings up an important question: if abortion is merely a medical procedure—a simple choice, then why should it be rare?”16 Recently Pastor Rick Warren, who provided the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration, reiterated the critique when challenging Obama’s pro-choice position: “Now, I don’t understand the, the idea of it should be rare and, and less. Well, either you believe it’s life or you don’t. It—why would you believe it should be rare? Because if, if it’s not—if a baby, a fetus is not a life, then why restrict it?”17

As this sentiment suggests, support for making abortion rare, presup- poses that abortion is wrong and somehow different than other health care. This ongoing marginalization of abortion as a different type of health care, one in which the goal is reduced use rather than expanded access and en- hanced quality, has contributed to the significant decline in the number of locations where abortions are performed in the United States. In 2004, only 1,787 facilities continued to provide abortion care and 86 percent of counties were without a known abortion provider.18 Increased access to care is not part of the “rare” message and efforts to expand services could be construed as working against the goal of making it less frequently used.

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