Inordinately restricting abortion hurts men, women and children. Men who don't want to be fathers should not be able to force women to have abortions, but they should not be forced to have children that neither they nor the women whom they have accidentally impregnated want.
Not every child who is born from an accidental pregnancy is unhappy, but many of them are. There are few feelings in the world that are worse than those of being an unwanted child.
Women have the right to have sex without being afraid that they'll be forced to have children. I know that misogyny says that there's nothing that men are able to do that women ought to be able to do, but that's wrong.
The decision about whether or not to have an abortion is agonizing enough for most people even when abortion is legal; there's no reason to make people fear for their own lives and the lives of people whom they love by making abortion illegal.
Something that never seems to be discussed when anti-abortion activists talk is that making abortion illegal means that every time that a woman gets pregnant, she has to give birth or risk an illegal abortion. It's not even as if she would have to give birth or risk an illegal abortion once, for one accidental pregnancy; every time that she had sex, she and her partner would have to fear pregnancy.
I don't think that eliminating women from the workplace by turning them into broodmares from adolescence to menopause is the way to address the difficulties of working parents.
Women don't forget that they've had abortions. They don't have them because they want them; they have them because abortion is a sad necessity. Safe and legal abortion is an indispensable right if women aren't going to live hobbled lives of subjugation to their gender.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 27, 2017 @ 6:23 p.m.
