Reply #216: I'm ardently pro-choice and I agree with your assessment [View All]

There's nothing wrong, IMHO, with working toward making abortion less necessary. The right has worked ONLY on making abortions less legal and accessible. Reaching toward common ground: better, more affordable and available birth control and sex education, better options for pre-natal and infant health care, better options for adoption... none of this impairs a woman's right to make a private medical decision herself.

So long as that right remains legally inviolate, I applaud anyone's attempts to lessen the need for abortions.

The choice side has often taken a strict, unyeilding position on the issue, fearful of a slippery slope leading toward the degradation of our rights. While I completely understand this, (when your back's up against the wall you don't feel like being accomodating), I think that we need a two-pronged approach: finding a way to insure the continued legality of abortion and shutting down the continuing legal challenges to both availablity and legality, and then finding ways to build bridges to the many sincere people on the "other side" of the issue who would be quite comfortable working toward lessening the need.

I don't have a problem with finding common ground -- in the long run, that's what's going to protect our rights.