Because Wallis wants to castigate pro-choice politicians for not giving his side enough rhetorical comfort, while the Bush administration is trying to prevent women from having access to current forms of birth control.

If you're pro-choice and you admit that having to have an abortion is tragic for many women, then (maybe) you're opening the door to "pregnancy crisis counseling," and counselors who you can't trust to not have agendas. If you're pro-life and you admit that abortion is sometimes medically necessary to save a woman's life, then you have to trust the doctors who are making the decision as to what's actually life threatening.

1) The Democratic Party platform, and pro-choice organizations, already support abortion reduction -- including support for the most effective abortion reducer of all, contraception. This is something that isn't included in the 95/10 proposal, and which is more effective than the 95/10 proposal.

2) The 95/10 proposal supports nonsense like "directing women to crisis pregnancy centers and scaring them with medically questionable "informed consent" requirements that talk-up abortion's so-called negative after effects."

Crisis pregnancy centers are scams set up by pro-lifers which claim they're going to help women, but which actually attempt to scare women away from abortion (even if that's what they'd choose). I have nothing against women choosing not to have abortions -- but it should be based on giving women the resources needed to decide for themselves, not on deceptive scare tactics.

It seems to me the first has always been the majority, the second lumps the other two together irrationally and the third continually tries to co-opt the first to advance its extremely minority position as the majority.

If you agree there are these three positions (and not just the two), answering the questions posed by Ta-Nehisi's seems sort of easy.

No, we can't. For one thing, the anti-abortion folks are more accurately described as anti-choice; when presented with options like extending contraception to more people, they stand against it, because they're more interested in punishing women then preventing abortions.

More to the point, if we cede that abortion is "icky," then there's no moral reason to support it. We can cede that abortion is not preferable to not having to have an abortion -- in all but a few cases, that's true. But being forced to continue pregnancy against one's will is far worse than either alternative, and any debate that cedes an inch on that should be opposed.

It's not quite how I see the proposals but I think I can understand where people come from on those issues. We should be championing those "abortion-reducing" ideas not because they reduce abortions but because they are good all-around ideas.

The problem is that the majority of people view abortion as a way to extend the conveniences of their lives. Will having a baby change your economic situation? Definitely. Will having a baby put a cramp on your social life? Absolutely.

But does that mean it isn't feasible, or that an abortion is the answer because it will allow things to remain easier or demand less sacrifice on the part of the parents?

I think there's a big difference between abortion "hobbyists" (those people who seem to love it so much they go on marches and volunteer for PPH) and the average person who supports abortion. Abortion is "icky" as you fearfully describe it. Any woman who has seen the deformed stillbirth when a doctor screws up can attest to this.

Yet it remains difficult for the hobbyists to discern between real instances of crisis -- endangered health of the mother, pregnancy by rape, etc -- and the typical "abortion for convenience" that's so popular in this country.

The sooner people come to grips with making that distinction, the sooner we can have an honest debate about reducing abortions. The hobbyists may never compromise, but then again, extremists rarely do.

Assuming for the sake of argument that such a psychotic view is actually a majority opinion, you've just put yourself in the minority. And then argued in favor your minority opinion.
I actually think you are in the majority, but acting like the underdog doesn't do much to make you sound like the non-extremist in the conversation.

Maybe it's because I'm here because of an unplanned pregnancy (my older brother's), and my folks are still married. Maybe it's because of that line from Cat's Cradle about unplanned invitations to travel being dancing lessons from god. I don't know.

And I totally get why someone who thinks that life begins at conception would think abortion is murder and would want to end it. Doesn't mean I agree, since if God exists and life begins at conception, then God kills more babies than anybody via simple biology.

But those maybes, and those metaphysical beliefs are both deeply personal, and my moral case for a pro-choice position is that we as a society don't force our citizens to adopt any particular metaphysics as long as they agree to abide by certain rules regarding behavior. And they pay their taxes. That's a big one.

I've never had to make that choice. The closest I ever came was when a friend came to me and said she wanted to have get an abortion, and she needed to borrow money so she could have it as early as possible, and she needed a ride to Illinois because she couldn't get one in our town. I said yes to both, and I held her hand when she needed me to, because that was the only choice I could live with, and I kept my damn mouth shut about morality and choices and pretty much everything except the weather and traffic.

Because she had made a damn hard choice, and I supported her. Because it wasn't something I could decide for her, and it certainly wasn't something that should be up to a judge, or some suit behind a desk to decide for her.

I wasn't comfortable with it. I'm not particularly comfortable with divorce, either, but I was glad to have the option when my wife left, you know?

I have persuaded several pro-lifers to be pro-choice by talking about my feelings on the matter, leading up to the fact that, in a democracy, we sometimes have to give people the freedom to make choices we disagree with, whether it be for idealist or practical matters, like a tee-totally voting to repeal Prohibition.

If you want to help young mothers with children, that's just a difference question entirely, one which has nothing to do with abortion.

It kind of depends on what you mean by "pro-choice". If it includes people who believe that abortion is morally/ethically wrong but shouldn't be legally restricted, then there is no inherent conflict between pro-choice and abortion reduction. If it implies not only legality of abortion, but full acceptance, then there is. (Although even someone who thinks abortion is a perfectly fine choice, no morally different from carrying to term, should favor reducing unwanted abortions by ensuring that mothers who would prefer to carry to term have the means to do so. They would just tend to view it more in terms of supporting the mother's right to choose to have her child.)

I am frustrated by this conversation because it so often focuses on what might be 'right' or 'wrong' which is really none of our business. Public Policy is our business. Balancing liberty, enforceability, and safety is our business.

Even if we think abortion is no more morally questionable than having a cavity filled, we should still support (IMO) measures to reduce them, because it's a medical procedure with risks, and because it's unpleasant (physically, if nothing else).

I posted an excerpt of Kimala Price's piece on choice on my site:

Drawing from human rights and social justice principles, women of color activists have re-defined “reproductive rights” into what they now call “reproductive justice.” Reproductive justice is not just about the individualistic right to have an abortion (i.e., the right not to have children) but to include the right to have children and to raise them in healthy and stable families. Accordingly, these activists have broadened reproductive rights and freedom beyond abortion rights, the rights to privacy and “choice” which are normally associated with the movement. In sum, reproductive justice encompasses many other issues such as economic justice, immigration rights, housing rights, and access to health care.

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/05/15/quoted-kimala-price-on-hip-hop-feminism-and-choice/

The act of having and raising a child has echoing effects. It is part personal responsibility, part circumstances, part societal responsibility and a comprehensive discussion on choice has to look at issues beyond the medical act itself.

This is a bunch of straw man crap. There is no national coven of witches out there who wants to abort your baby, OK? It sickens me that you equate volunteering at Planned Parenthood to abortion "hobbyism."

So, imagine if every man who wanted a woman to carry her baby to term was asked to carry an extra 20 pounds for 6 months, to endure insomnia due to being constantly poked, to endure someone standing on his sciatic nerve for hours at a timeor any of the other unpleasant bodily intrusions, , to endure the endless unsolicited attentions of the public, including touching, and at the end of the period be forced to play russian roulette with a revolver that has 4 bullets in 100 chambers.

Support for a woman which is contingent on her keeping the baby is not, ipso facto, support. It is support for an ideology, not for a woman.

I would like to see fewer abortions. I don't think anyone sees an abortion as a fun time. Nobody gets pregnant just so they can have an abortion. The number of women who think, "Never mind about contraception, I can always get an abortion, trala" is vanishingly small. I am not willing to see abortions reduced at the cost of shaming of the women who get them. Why can't we respect a decision along the lines of "I can't give a child what it needs to have to be successful in the world"?

The best way to reduce abortions is to reduce unwanted pregnancies, especially teen pregnancy. This is something that we can work on with Wallis and people like him. I think he's at heart a guy who wants to make things better. Contraception access and education, poverty reduction, abstinence (but not abstinence-only) education. It's all good. Just make sure it works, and doesn't come at the cost of shaming.

It's possible to think the abortion rate's too high and can be reduced because of social failures, not because individual women are having casual abortions & should be ashamed of themselves.

I didn't vote for her, but you know who threads this needle pretty well? Hillary Clinton.

I'd love to be able to form coalitions with anti-abortion people. But when people say things like "it's not enough to overturn Roe v. Wade," I get really nervous. There's a difference between coalition-building and accepting a Trojan horse.

Latoya's comment above on "reproductive justice" makes its goals sound really similar to those of "abortion reduction." But "reproductive justice" signals a movement in favor of a positive good, not against something--something that women fought really hard to get, and that many other women died as a result of not having. "Abortion reduction" raises a pro-choice woman's hackles in the same way that "gun control" freaks out NRA types; it's language that, in both cases, proposes to limit the exercise of a constitutional right that its proponents fought really hard for (one key difference being that women die as a result of not having access to abortions, while not having access to guns is rarely fatal--to the contrary). That's why Clinton called it a "Pregnant Woman Support Act," not a "Potential Abortion-Getter Mind-Changing Act."

It matters whether you see abortion reduction as a side effect of supporting pregnant women or vice versa, when you're dealing with a conflict in which one side advocates the rights of a fetus over those of its mother. Feminists may want the same things as Wallis, but such proposals are always enacted in someone's name--the mother's or the fetus's. This may not be totally fair, but I kind of think that it's up to the evangelicals to cede the point and allow their own goal--abortion reduction--to be the side effect rather than the main point. A reduction in abortions looks the same in the eyes of God by whatever name, right? But it doesn't look the same in politics, and the pro-choice agenda is grounded in the struggle for political rights.

The anti-choice side goes for things like declaring contraception to be equivalent to abortion, and trying to restrict access to it. That's as extreme as one can get.