What our elected representatives should say: Abortion

No one supports abortion. Most of us would like to see fewer abortions take place. Abortion presents a problem most of us would like to be able to solve. The way to solve a problem is to find out what is causing it and see if those things can be changed. So, we need to pay attention to why women get abortions and attack those root causes. This probably means providing more access to contraception. People will have sex. We can’t really stop that, and we don’t need to. There are a lot of ways people can have sex without making babies. We need to provide easy access to whatever people, including young people, need to be able to have sex in these safe ways. That should be the really easy part. The harder part is to address the more systemic problems which cause women to seek abortions, like poverty and sex crimes. If we stopped spending money fighting about the legality of abortion, there would be more money to attack these systemic problems. If I am elected, I would approach abortion not as a divisive issue involving deeply held values and beliefs. I wouldn’t waste my time talking about rights and definitions of death. I would take the issue back from the folks on the fringes who have hijacked it for their own aggrandizement, and reframe it as a simple problem that we all want to solve … a simple problem that we should be able to sit down together and work on. That’s all abortion really is, a problem that we could solve if we showed any interest in solving it. That’s all I’m really interested in, solving problems.