Jackson Free Press

May 3, 2006

Eleven states are now considering bills that severely restrict abortion. Six of the 11 only allow abortion when the mother's life is at stake. Another four declare that life begins at fertilization, which must make fertility clinics, with their thousands of frozen, single-cell citizens awfully nervous. What if one of the embryos hires a lawyer?

Seven of the 11 are in the South if you count Missouri, and I do. If these bills become law under an untested Supreme Court, women in the South will either have to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles to get an abortion, even if they're only four weeks pregnant, or risk septic death on a butcher's table. Mississippi is not on the list, thanks to the parliamentary machinations of Steve Holland, D-Plantersville, but these will not work a second time.

Many opponents of abortion rights are not "pro-life," for they also oppose affordable education and easy access to birth control, which do far more to reduce abortion than the zealots screaming outside abortion clinics.

More to the point, we do not face a choice between abortion or adoption, but rather between legal abortion or illegal abortion. We tried the second, and it killed thousands of women. But why pretend to argue? This is a state so mixed up about sex that it bans the sale of "marital aids," and no one ever got pregnant from one of those.