Quotes from Katha Pollitt

A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.

Deaths from legal abortion declined fivefold between 1973 and 1985 (from 3.3 deaths to 0.4 deaths per 100,000 procedures)," reported the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs, reflecting increased physician education and skills, improvements in medical technology, and, notably, the earlier termination of pregnancy.

But what does it mean to feel pressured or coerced to abort? Abortion opponents cite lurid news stories of women threatened with guns or even murdered for rejecting abortion. That's coercion. But a parent who lays out in detail the hard life of a single mother is not forcing a daughter to terminate her pregnancy, nor is a boyfriend who says he's not up for marriage or ready to be a father, or a sister who says there's no room for another baby in a shared apartment.

Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser.

According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the US Preventative Services Task Force, there is no medical reason for a gynecological exam to get a prescription for the Pill, with an annual repeat in order to renew it.13

An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that "a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain."8

though he's wrong about how these methods work. It's religion—facts don't matter, especially when the facts involve women's liberty.

Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman's body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.

That women want early abortion, that many women prefer medication to surgery, that especially in rural areas it would be a lot simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a prescription from their local OBGYN or GP than to travel long distances to a clinic, that it would be a good thing to free women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters—none of that mattered. What women want in their abortion care is simply not important.

A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state.

The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not assume that her body ceased to be her own because she was pregnant.

But now, with clinics disappearing, more and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills, as women do in Ireland and other countries where it is illegal for a woman to end a pregnancy. Some will end up in emergency rooms. Some will be injured. Some may die. This is what laws supposedly intended to protect women from "dangerous" clinics will have accomplished. This is what the so-called pro-life movement will have done for "life.

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause

Clinic doctors, nurses, directors, and employees risk their lives to help women. Patient escorts, abortion-fund volunteers, bloggers, organizers, lawyers, and thousands of other activists work tirelessly to keep abortion legal, expand access, change the discourse, and sway the vote.

There's pushback on the legislative front as well. In 2013, California passed the nation's only law that year to expand abortion access: Nurses and some other health professionals (midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) are now permitted to perform first-trimester nonsurgical abortions.30 (This is what can happen when a state is controlled by Democrats.)

But it's the millions of pro-choice Americans who are so far uninvolved (and still complacent) that will ultimately decide the fate of legal abortion in this country.

As I've mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman.

Maybe Blackmun's mistake was thinking that a woman could claim privacy as a right in the first place. A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state.

We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child—indeed, sometimes more moral.

Pro-choicers often say no one is "pro-abortion," but what is so virtuous about adding another child to the ones you're already overwhelmed by? Why do we make young women feel guilty for wanting to feel ready for motherhood before they have a baby? Isn't it a good thing that women think carefully about what it means to bring a child into this world—what, for example, it means to the children she already has?

I've always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room - according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail - and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.

I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away like the roughness on a pebble in a creekbed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core.

The ten states where women's status is highest (measured by economic security, leadership, and health) are strongly Democratic, with strong secular cultures (in order: Maryland, Hawaii, Vermont, California, Delaware, Connecticut, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Washington).