Saturday, April 23, 2005

An odd problem, upon reflection

I've been meeting some wonderful, caring and passionate prochoice women on various blogs recently. And I keep praying that one of them will be the one that starts a move within the prochoice movement to put patient safety in the forefront. But ever time I've met a great prochoice woman who is really committed to choice rather than abortion, and who really cares about the women, one of two things happens:

1. I lose contact with her.

2. She becomes a convert to the prolife cause and is no longer able to network effectively within the prochoice community to mobilize them into action on behalf of women's safety.

It's like there's some sort of tipping point -- that the combination of concern for the women and frustration about prochoice hostility to addressing safety issues just put the scales over and the woman comes out prolife.

Which makes me wonder how to deal with the problem. Prolifers can't address abortion safety, because anything we say, no matter how thoroughly documented, is dismissed out-of-hand. And prochoicers ... well, it seems like once they come to care enough about safety to actually want to do anything about it, they'll spill over into the prolife camp before they have a chance to do anything.

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