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“There’s a Reason Gay Marriage Is Winning, While Abortion Rights Are Losing”

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Ukraine is not the only subject on which The Nation is shockingly tone-death. The recent article that struggles to explain why abortion rights can’t be as successful as gay rights misses the crucial reason by a wide margin: abortion access is only problematic for women who are economically deprived. This is a class issue nowadays.

The social class that has the leisure, the expertise, and the energy to drive social change is the same class that doesn’t find it hard to access medical care and obtain abortions. Hence the general indifference to the subject.

3 responses to ““There’s a Reason Gay Marriage Is Winning, While Abortion Rights Are Losing””

  1. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    She mentions it in passing:
    §  Marriage equality has cross-class appeal: Anyone can have an LGBT child, and parents across the political spectrum naturally want their kids to have the same opportunities other children have. Any woman might find herself needing an abortion, too, but she may not realize that. Improvements in birth control mean that prosperous, educated women with private doctors can control their fertility pretty well—certainly better than women who rely on public clinics—and if they need an abortion, they can get one. It’s low-income women who suffer the most from abortion restrictions—and since when have their issues been at the top of the middle and upper classes’ to-do list?

    Everything in this article is either been beaten into the ground (I get NARAL & Planned Parenthood solicitations all the time), or so obvious I’ve had these thoughts years ago.

    Anyways, she doesn’t address the fights over contraception in the health care law, which if you buy that explanation, should have concerned middle and upper class women who are the most likely to have insurance through their jobs and to have their employers pick up parts of the premiums, if only on the principle of “don’t take away things I already have and make things more difficult for me.”

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  2. shadowofashade Avatar
    shadowofashade

    “abortion access is only problematic for women who are economically deprived.”

    Simple solution: sterilize them all, or don’t have sex.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    There is after all the idea that lobbying for marriage rights is a pretty respectable thing to do* while abortion will always have stigma – even very firmly pro-choice people like me mostly prefer that abortion would be the exception rather than the rule.

    *if we’re talking about people wanting in on the party as opposed to those like Masha Gessen who want to use marriage equality to destroy the institution as most people know it…

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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