Prevention or punishment: How this choice will influence the next election

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I've talked a lot about framing the debate over reproductive freedom as a battle between those who advocate prevention and those who advocate punishment.

Some of you may have misunderstood or underestimated what I meant by the word "punishment." Perhaps you thought "punishment for doctors who perform abortions." That's bad enough.

But what if I told you that there are public officials out there who are serious about punishing women who choose to have an abortion?

What if I told you it was already beginning to happen?

Attorney General Phill Kline, a [Kansas] Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two years in the post, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying on Thursday that he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases.

Advocates on both sides of the abortion issue said the broad investigation, backed by a judge's subpoena, is the first of its kind in pursuit of criminal charges, although the federal Justice Department has unsuccessfully sought similar records in its defense of a ban on a procedure sometimes used to end pregnancies after the first trimester that doctors call intact dilation and extraction and that critics call partial-birth abortion.

These people are serious. And they have to be stopped. Now.

Apparently, only the Supreme Court can stop them.

Here's the thing: I don't think it is possible to overstate the horror I feel in contemplating a world in which my daughter may have to grow up, if it is run by people like Phil Kline.

If you still don't understand why I want to reduce abortions through prevention, it is simply this: I believe in a woman's right to be free and to be free to choose -- to choose what happens to her life, to choose what happens to her body.

I am in favor of anything that represents more freedom of choice, not less.

And in an enlightened society, when it comes to reproductive freedom, that free choice belongs to the woman, not the police, not the judge, not the jury, not the legislature.

And not, God help us, to Phil Kline.