The incomparable s.e. smith @ Tiger Beatdown:
Every time a progressive justifies abortion, one of those horrid ‘lamenting the preborn killed by pinko commie scum’ websites gets another set of animated sparkling angel wings and a dreadful midi.
Private medical procedures do not require justification. As soon as you act like they do, you open up a line of conversation that is better left closed; you’re creating an opening where there wasn’t one before, and it’s one that directly harms the people who need access to abortion services. As soon as you start talking about why people have abortions, you set up a tiered world of ethically justified abortions versus others. You tell patients getting abortions after rapes, for example, that they will be supported and no one blames them for making a private medical decision, while leaving patients getting abortions for ‘bad’ or ‘selfish’ reasons with the impression that you are judging them.
Abortions don’t come in kinds or flavours, unless you want to talk about specific differences between individual procedures related to the stage of the pregnancy and the best procedure for the patient’s needs. There is no such thing as an ethically justified root canal versus an ethically ambiguous root canal. There’s just a procedure deemed medically neccessary after examination and discussion between doctor and patient, and a decision made on the basis of all available information.
You can talk openly about having a root canal. And you don’t need to justify it. ‘I just wasn’t ready to have a cavity.’ ‘It was causing an infection that could have killed me.’
Read the whole thing here.