Clinton said that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. He was right. It may be true that we as a society need to work harder to make it rare -- but making it illegal will only make it unsafe. Abortion was practiced in ancient Rome, illegally. Ovid wrote a nasty poem about his girlfriend's abortion, saying she had no right to do it, but the foetus probably wasn't even his -- wholly and utterly irresponsible.

I had an illegal abortion, many many years ago. It was performed secretly, in the middle of the night, with no anesthetic, on a guerney in a darkened kitchen, by a Mexican midwife who kept telling me to hush, to be quiet, not to yell, she was afraid her neighbors would hear. Of course it was scarey and painful. I was young and dumb, and lucky enough to be able to have two healthy children later, whom I love dearly and whom I have often mentioned in other threads. Of course I talked about it with my boyfriend at the time, who agreed with my decision. He wasn't any prize, and probably would have agreed with anything I said, and I had to pay for it myself. I also had to travel for the abortion into another state, and I was alone.

If you haven't had to make that choice yourself, I submit that you have no idea what is involved. I have a young friend who is facing it now, and my own experience is so distant that even I can't fully appreciate what she is up against. If this procedure becomes illegal again, the people who suffer will not be the unborn, not potential people, but (mostly) young adults, with their whole lives stretching out ahead of them, who have done one dumb thing.