This bend-don't-break post of Kevin Drum's, and other like it, are getting attention on the lefty blogs. Kevin writes:
Liberals are in favor of choice, not in favor of abortion per se, so why shouldn't we talk more often about policies that reduce the need for abortions while continuing to defend the right of choice itself? This won't impress the hardcore evangelicals, of course, but it might appeal to some of their more moderate neighbors. Ditto for porn.
B. Snyder, commenter in the thread, couldn't have been happier:
Finally, a liberal addresses my hot button on abortion. Why, oh why, oh why has the feminist/abortion lobby spent such a disproportionate share of their resources on the choice issue (Roe V. Wade) instead of on making abortions virtually unnecessary?We have the technology to make, as Bill Clinton says, "rare". But I never hear anyone on the left talk about it.
B. Snyder should know that the wacko Right is after that technology too. They're no friend of birth control or anything that would actually lessen a woman's chances of needing an abortion. But, I agree with both him and Kevin when they say that the Left doesn't approach the issue of women's reproductive health the right way. I saw it with Kerry and I saw it with the Ginny Schrader campaign here. The trick with our core issues like this one is to reframe the debate. If we're really in favor of keeping abortion safe and rare - and we are - then it should be the last thing we mention in a long list of women's reproductive health issues that are threatened by the Radical Right's agenda. Abortion is the result of their policies, not ours.
All that said, it won't matter what we say or how we say it if we don't develop a television and radio network that can take on what the Right has now.
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