Worthwhile Reads: Another Look at Abortion

What the Right Gets about Abortion and the Left Doesn’t Get, on Away Point

Reproductive rights leaders are worried about an intensity gap between Millennials who support and oppose abortion. Frankly, we deserve it. For the past twenty years, while pro-choice advocates muttered about statistics and privacy and tested make-nice language like “nobody is pro-abortion” or “let’s make it safe, legal and rare,” anti-choice advocates have created a gut-level aversion to abortion in a whole generation of young Americans. Most Millennials have experienced the billboards. What they haven’t experienced is the gut-wrenching stories of real people—people they know and love—whose lives are more whole because they were able to choose. If you want to change the game, get out of the closet with your abortion story, or your mother’s story, or your grandmother’s story. Get up your nerve by watching videos or reading stories posted at the 1 in 3 campaign. Our sometimes-beautiful sometimes-heartbreaking sometimes-proud sometimes-ordinary stories are the stuff of real personhood.

The Only Good Abortion is My Abortion, by Maggie Koerth-Baker

There is no universal good option. There is no universal bad option. But for each individual there is an option that is the least bad. Here is why I am pro-choice. If someone has to make a decision and the best they can hope for is the least-bad option, I don’t believe I have any business making that choice for them.

My abortion is not a good abortion. It’s just an abortion. And there’s no reason to treat the decision I have to make any differently than the decisions made by any other woman.