yesterday, i plugged trish wilson's post about selective abortion. the post was responding to an essay in last sunday's new york times magazine. the essay made a strong impression on my wife too. not realizing i indirectly linked to it on my blog, she brought it up last night before we went to sleep. and then this morning on the train, i read barbara ehrenreich's piece owning up to abortion.
abortion, it seems, is in the air again. what's striking, however, is that these discussions are not the same tired argument this country experienced over the past few decades. they are not really about whether abortion should be legal. instead they all take as a given that abortion is legal but rather explore the ethical issues in various circumstances where someone is faced with a choice of whether or not to abort.
could it be that we've finally turned a corner on this issue? for the past several years its become increasingly obvious that the pro-choice side won the abortion debate. sure, there are plenty of pro-lifers out there, and there are still all kinds of efforts to attack or restrict abortion rights in this country. but the cloud of doom that i remember hanging over the heads of the pro-choice movement in the late 1980s seems to have disappated. plenty of people are fighting to preserve abortion rights, but there seems to be an underlying confidence that, at least for now, this country is unlikely to overturn roe v. wade.
it's only when you're no longer afraid of slippery slopes that you can begin an honest discussion about whether a particular abortion decision was justified or not (even if everyone agrees it should be a legal right). i don't know whether we've reached this next level of discourse about the issue yet. to be fair both the sunday article that spawned trish's discussion and the ehrenreich op-ed appeared in the new york times, so that hardly can be used as an indication of any change in the overall tone discussion of abortion. but it would be nice if we were on the verge of a whole new way to discuss abortion, without fear that it will inadvertently lead to any rights being taken away
