What is Reproductive Freedom?

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Carol Joffee argues that abortion can best be defended if it is framed as one element of a larger platform of sexual and reproductive rights and services:

Abortion can’t be defended by a single issue focus— as urgent as the defense of Roe needs to be.

To reinvigorate itself and draw new support, from both progressives and others, the reproductive freedom movement must go back to its roots. The movement must reaffirm its willingness to fight for a full range of services that make it possible not only to prevent unwanted pregnancies but to enable women to have and raise the children they want.

This means vigorous support not only of contraception, prenatal care, and child care services, but also of living-wage campaigns, occupational health issues, and of course, full health care coverage for all Americans.

But important as such efforts to put abortion in context are, reciting a litany of services will not in itself make the emotional connections needed if abortion is to become acceptable in this culture.

To be sure, for those who truly think abortion is murder, no reframing will ever work. But for the majority of Americans who don’t agree with the concept of abstinence till marriage, and who do think procreation should be separate from sexuality, there is one overriding message from the reproductive freedom movement that needs to accompany any demands for a full range of reproductive services: it is that we trust women to make the right decisions about their own bodies.

Joffee wrote this article for the Rockridge Institute website. Bookmark it and visit regularly.