here's my issue with the 'rare' part of safe, legal and rare

[HereSince1628]

30. Abortion should be legal and available because

self-defense is always legal.

For over 40 years this truth has taken back seat to language that emphasizes the reality that terminating a pregnancy is the end of a life. Advocacy has been allowed to spin around irrelevant questions about when life begins and the preciousness of human life.

Life began a billion years ago and comes to each generation in an uninterrupted stream. Life is precious because death cannot be undone.

None of that precludes the right and necessity of self-defense. Our society accepts that self-defense and defense of society and nation sometimes requires homicide. Trying to frame abortion as something else is an affront to common sense of even the most marginally educated.

No matter how unpleasant the idea of terminating life may be, no matter how each individual may hope and expect to never need to invoke it, the right to self-defense is fundamental to human rights.

Women must have this right of self-defense as a matter of equality. The nature of our species' reproductive physiology focuses this as a woman's issue, while the advance of technology has made this right enforceable. Birth control and abortion are pathways to realization of this right.

For over 40 years promotion of reproductive rights as self-defence has been pushed off the table by rhetoric about legal and religious claims of humanness and false suppositions that innocence of the unborn can not be harmful.

It's time to recognize that abortion is an act of self-defense.

I'm pro-self defense and pro- women's right to self-determination.