“To integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned . . . is the future,” declares the author of yesterday’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine . But it’s not, writes our managing editor, Mary Rose Somarriba, in today’s “On the Square” article, You Can’t Take the Back Alley Out of Abortion . And — this was a neat trick — she shows why using evidence from the article itself.
And then explains what this means for the advocates of abortion themselves:
The abortion supporters . . . embody the single biggest indicator of delusion, which is this: In order to see things working out their way, they have to imagine the world different than it is. Bazelon describes one Planned Parenthood director who “looked out the window, at all the people who she wished could feel the urgency she does, and pointed out that change in medicine comes slowly.”And abortion supporters need this to keep going — they need to keep looking forward to the vision they have in mind. But what they lose along the way is a deeper understanding of why abortion isn’t accepted in public and medical life. Rather than trying to understand why support for abortion dwindles, they turn away, they cover up, they try to hide the discomforting part of abortion from patients, from nurses, from themselves.
