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Maybe the majority who support safe, legal abortion and accessible birth control had to be literally under siege before we woke up to the fact that we've been doing it wrong.
Not the sex, the P.R.
Instead of countering incendiary rhetoric with patient explanations, we could have been crowing about all the patriotic, pro-family things "choice" has done for America.
That's just what Cristina Page does by returning fire in the culture war with her book, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America."
She's one of two pro-choice "patriots" riding to the rescue and into Seattle in the next two weeks. On May 2 former NARAL president Kate Michelman will speak at Town Hall about her new book, "With Liberty and Justice for All."
Today Page will meet here with supporters of NARAL Pro-Choice America and with local physicians to take their temperature on the access issue: access to abortion and to birth control including the emergency contraception, Plan B.
It's the family-planning movement that reduced poverty by half in America and opened the doors to college, careers and the work force to women. And birth control allowed men and women to marry when they wanted to, not when they had to, Page says.
It's the so-called pro-life movement that opposes things like family medical leave, day-care subsidies and insurance coverage for family planning that allow people to have the families they desire. And it's the movement's opposition to emergency contraception that increases the number of the very-late-term abortions it rails against by setting up an obstacle course of restrictions and outright assaults on birth control.
"Not one pro-life organization in the U.S. supports contraception to reduce abortion," Page told me. "It's the pro-choice movement that's actually working to reduce abortion."
Even as I pondered the seemingly outrageous idea that pro-life groups overtly oppose contraception as well as abortion, the latest from the Christian Newswire popped up in my e-mail with a statement from the No Room for Contraception Campaign.
It was a broadside against a joint effort to find common ground to reduce abortions issued last week by Senators Harry Reid (pro life) and Hillary Clinton (pro choice).
There can be no common ground, the No Room folks objected, insisting that no "artificial contraception" of any kind can be effective in preventing abortion.
And, just recently when Page was debating Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, she asked him about the sweeping South Dakota abortion ban. His response? It isn't a perfect law. If it were a perfect law, it would ban contraception, too, he said.
Also, Page suggests we ask ourselves why one of the biggest supposedly pro-family groups in the country, Concerned Women for America, doesn't offer maternity leave to its employees. If having and cherishing babies is its foremost agenda, why wouldn't that group?
Well, whaddaya know?
Abortions actually rose in America under pro-life Presidents Reagan and Bush I and fell under pro-choice Clinton, Page points out.
Faced with waiting periods, parental notifications and the lack of access to abortion providers, women don't stop having abortions. But many do wait longer -- and further into their pregnancies -- to get them. Pregnant 17-year-olds, for instance, often postpone the procedure until they turn 18 so they don't have to tell their parents.
And that poverty thing?
Back in the '50s, before the pill and easy, certain family planning, one in four families lived in poverty. Today, with smaller families and more income for women, it's one in eight. And the rate of teen motherhood in the '50s was twice what it is today.
Bolstered by family planning, women's incomes have proven to be the greatest solution to poverty since the New Deal, Page says, not to mention their contribution to family stability. Because of it, men have more flexibility in their jobs and choices. Nearly 85 percent report spending more time with their kids. And half as many couples in the Cleaver era reported themselves as happily married compared with those responding to surveys today.
And, if you think this paean to the positives of choice comes off the top of Page's head, think again. The book, which Publisher's Weekly describes as a "well-researched and pointed critique of pro-life excesses," supports its claims with research ranging from Harvard University to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
But the book is not meant as one more wedge between pro-choice and pro-life forces. It's aimed at least in part at illuminating the contrast between pro-life people and the pro-life movement. The idea behind that was born several years ago when Page knew a woman her age who was active in a right-to-life organization. Eventually they co-wrote a call to action that recommended that both movements unite to make contraception more widely available to reduce abortions. Kind of like what Sens. Reid and Clinton are doing now.
Immediately the pro-life woman found her job at the right-to-life group in jeopardy and her mouth zipped.
Sad, Page says, because many pro-lifers do support the use of contraception to prevent terminations. If they knew how deeply opposed the right-to-life movement is to that concept, they might stop giving money to those groups.
Despite efforts to paint women who have abortions as a bunch of irresponsible singles having promiscuous sex, the majority actually is married and already mothers. And about 40 percent are Evangelical Christians and Catholics.
Maybe, on the field of this weary battle, we could spy some common ground after all if the smoke only cleared.
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