President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I support abortion rights. Being pro-choice means a lot of different things to me – among them, that abortion should be safe, legal, accessible, subsidized and provided with empathy and non-judgement.

You may have noticed a word missing there.

"Safe legal and rare" first became a pro-choice rallying cry during the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like – even President Obama has called the mantra "the right formulation" on abortion. It's a "safe" pro-choice answer: to support abortion, but wish it wasn't necessary.

And it's a framing that Hillary Clinton – perhaps the next president of the United States – supports.

But "safe, legal and rare" is not a framework that supports women's health needs: it stigmatizes and endangers it.

In a 2010 research article, Dr Tracy Weitz, Director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote that "rare suggests that abortion is happening more than it should, and that there are some conditions for which abortions should and should not occur".

"It separates 'good' abortions from 'bad' abortions", she added.

Steph Herold, the deputy director of the Sea Change Program – an organization that seeks to create a culture change around abortion and other stigmatized reproductive experiences like miscarriage and adoption – agrees. "It implies that abortion is somehow different than other parts of healthcare," she told me. "We don't say that any other medical procedure should be rare."
"We don't say that we want heart bypasses to be rare. We say we want people to be healthy," Herold said.

The "rare" framework adds to the stigmatization around the procedure – and that has further-reaching complications for abortion care than just how women feel about it.

Weitz wrote that calling for abortions to be rare has tangible negative consequences for women and women's health because it legitimizes efforts to legally restrict abortion – i.e., make it more "rare". Worse yet, it "negates the mandates for routine training in abortion", since students and teachers wonder why they should get medical training for something that supposedly should be rare.

"We want there to be as many abortions as there needs to be", Herold told me.
...
We can focus on keeping abortions safe and legal. We should also work harder to make sure they're affordable, accessible and judgement free. But let's not bolster anti-choice rhetoric and activism by calling for them to be "rare" – especially since there are so many working to ensure that "rare" is an enforced standard, not just a talking point.

Hillary Clinton must reject the stigma that abortion should be legal but 'rare' | Jessica Valenti

 

Sure. And we were told how dumb we were.

And the New York Times and Politico didn't agree with us -- and certainly not on the same day, in similar articles.

The only day Obama got grief from the media for playing golf is when he teed of five minutes after making a statement about a journalist who got his head chopped of by ISIS.

Coincidentally, it was also the one day journalists were fed up with radical Islamic terror, and the President's disinterest in combating it.

 

But it's true. And he hammered Obama about the same thing.

 

@Starman was the biggest critic of the NCAA bracket.

 

In general I agree, but there are certain topics that are perennial tar pits. Abortion is one. It leads to page after page of argument and damn little new light shed on the subject. That debate deserves its own thread instead of overrunning the "look what stupid shit Trump did this time" thread.

 

A non-radical position includes a definition of life that doesn't call two cells fully human and doesn't call a 35-week fetus a parasitic growth

 

Doesn't that apply to abortion to gun rights to environmental issues to zoning laws to the concussion problem in football to damn near everything?

 

An abortion thread? Pretty sure we'd only be allowed to post on it for 30 minutes on the third Wednesday of every fourth month in even-numbered years that don't end in 0, 2 or 6.

 

Beating heart?

 

Does being with @Starman really make you feel better?

 

You're not a woman, so you don't get to decide what is and is not a radical position.

 

I didn't jump on that bandwagon.