The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

• « Prev | Main | Next »

  
  

  Q: Abortion Should Be Legal in (All, Most, Some, Few, No) Cases

  Posted Monday, July 07, 2008 6:12 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Rachael,

  All right, you caught me on my own overheated rhetoric (see what I get for posting at 6 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend? I had a great time at Boston's beautiful fireworks, by the way—hope you had a fab weekend too!). No, I do not believe that being willing to perform abortions should be a requirement for getting and keeping a medical license. However, polls show that for the past decades, upward of 80 percent of Americans believe that abortion procedures should be legal at least in some circumstances. Presumably, then, that's also true of upward of 80 percent of physicians.

  So, why aren't life-saving abortion procedures taught in medical schools' ordinary ob-gyn classes? Why don't 80 percent of women's ob-gyn practitioners offer the procedure, at least sometimes? Why must the procedure be ghettoized in special clinics, performed by only the few who are willing to risk their lives to save women from having their uteruses pierced by coat hangers, protected by extreme security procedures?

  Because performing abortions at all—in any circumstances—brings in credible death threats, murder attempts, and sometimes murder. The 20 percent (or fewer) of Americans who believe it should never be legal to free a woman of an unwanted pregnancy—even if doing so would save her life—have scared the rest. That's what I mean by the overheated rhetoric. I should have added "and homicide."

   EJ

  Filed under: women, abortion, South Dakota

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

PRINT DISCUSS