Wherein Amy responds to the liberal retreat on abortion...

Abortion is a Right that Ends in Sorrow, says Sarah Blustain in this month's American Prospect:

To this generation, the “choice” of a legal abortion is no longer something to celebrate. It is a decision made in crisis, and it is never one made happily. Have you ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? Even a married, intentionally pregnant woman who has had a “D and C” for a dying or dead embryo? A college student whose birth control failed? I promise you, such a woman does not talk about exercising the “right to choose.” You may accuse her -- and me -- of taking such rights for granted, and maybe you’d be right. But mainly she will tell you how sad she is, how she wished she hadn’t had to make that “choice,” how unpleasant the procedure was. She is more likely depressed than defiant.

Ms. Blustain would like us all to not sound so damn happy about abortions. She rightly points out that lots of women who have abortions are depressed about it afterward. But she should also recognize that some women who have abortions are not depressed afterwards. ( see www.imnotsorry.net ). And that some women who do not have abortions are depressed afterwards too.

To single abortion out as a right that ends in sorrow is to claim that it is somehow different from other rights we have, other choices we might make. This is not the case. To choose is to close doors, to annihilate a possible future, and in that sense, all choices may carry sorrow with them, sorrow for the future that was lost. The right to choose, yes, opens us up to making the wrong choice, one that may well weigh on you for the rest of your life. This is the tragedy of our free will, and it is not confined to abortion.

The truth is, we humans swim, breathe, and sometimes choke and drown in sorrow. It is right and good to talk about that sorrow. But this argument, suddenly, that I'm hearing from many quarters, that pro-choice activists are too strident, too focused on rights and choices, too hardline, it bothers me.

Pro-choice activists must take a hardline stance about abortion precisely because it is the strategy of pro-life activists not to. They pretend to moderation, suggesting reasonable restrictions, a little FDA warning here, a little parental notification there. At the same time, they increase funding for abstinence-only programs, which do not prevent pregnancy, and decrease access to birth control. They do not intend to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare". They do not compromise; they use an incremental strategy to deceive the American public. So that one day, when we wake up and find that abortion is not safe, not legal, and no longer rare, we will wonder how we got there.

And this is how; by conceding to them that there should be some restrictions, since abortion is such a really awful thing. We should not do this.

Yes, abortion is a right that sometimes ends in sorrow, as all rights sometimes do. But sorrow never was decreased in this world by taking rights away. To live with the choices you have made is not always easy, but it sure beats living with the choices someone else made for you.