I’ve been reading bits and pieces of the debate between William Saletan and Katha Pollitt about whether pro-choice people should advocate reducing the number of abortions to zero. Heidi and I have this debate in some form every now and again. Both of us are pro-choice but we arrive at that position from different directions. Saletan (who is closer to my position) and Pollitt (who is closer to Heidi’s) cover the territory well, and the debate is well worth reading. If you’re already pro-choice or simply want to know why people are pro-choice, read this.

There are some very honest things said here, and I’d be lying if Heidi and I haven’t gone through these same hard questions. Thursday’s exchange was a good one. This bit from from Saletan was good:

Before I go, I forgot to answer your original question. You ask why I think abortion is bad. I think it’s bad because the fetus is of us and is becoming us. It’s not a person, but it’s on the way to becoming a person, and the longer it develops, the more I recoil at the idea of killing it. Most people, according to polls, think the same way.

What about you? You say pro-choicers don’t see abortion as “morally trivial.” You say they defend it as a reluctant decision, a “sad necessity,” a “morally serious, very unfortunate event.” Is that how you see it?

Pollitt responded:

After I sent off my entry yesterday afternoon I asked myself: What exactly are Will and I arguing about? We both agree, after all, that it’s better not to have an unwanted pregnancy in the first place than to have an abortion, we both agree that America needs lots more birth control and lots more realistic sex education. We both want emergency contraception to be widely available over the counter. We both want men to take more responsibility—to use condoms, for example. If you and I were actually designing policy, I’m guessing we’d see the practical piece much the same way: Ramp up that funding! Build those clinics! Make health insurance companies pay for birth control like they pay for Viagra. We’d ask stern questions about how that male pill is coming along and about when we might see some new options for women. We’d look at the experience of countries with lower rates of unwanted pregnancy, teen births, and abortion (every other Western industrialized nation); we’d interview experts and study the literature, we’d set up a bunch of pilot programs to see what worked best with what sub-populations.

And then would come the ad campaign. Mine would have pictures of cheerful girls and women: “At my local Saletan clinic, the doctors are great and birth control is free! They really took time with me and answered all my questions. Best of all, I can call anytime and talk to a nurse in total privacy. Thanks to Saletan, I’ll have a baby when I’m ready—but not till then.” Yours would show a spiky-haired, pierced, and tattooed girl looking sullen and miserable: “I stayed out all night and forgot to take my Pill. Now I’m having an abortion and it’s totally my fault. Go on, hate me, I deserve it! If only I’d listened to the doctors at Saletan.” Or maybe you could have a picture of a stern-looking nun standing in front of an abortion clinic: “Birth Control: Because Purgatory’s better than Hell.”

Those are, in a nutshell, the important points. Heidi and I literally had an argument for like 45 minutes during one of our road trips on the subject of insurance funding for Viagra vs. birth control. Like Pollitt, I wonder what Heidi and I are arguing about sometimes. We agree on the end result, but the details of why and how and what we say becomes just as critical.

The unfortunate subtext of this debate is that both sides of the political abortion debate have made it so that the sides can’t be honest about the issue. Pro-choicers do actually want to reduce the number of abortions. It would be nice if we could say so without worrying about the words being twisted by opponents more interested in winning points rather than having an honest discussion.

(the debate found via Atrios, who also had an interesting opinion on this)