F/A with the morning after pill for screwups seems a reasonable alternative.

I am not sure I get your point about pro-choice not really advocating existing choices. If unwanted pregnancies are a major issue, then the most effective forms of b/c are to be desired. A method that fails approximately 10% in any year (I don’t know the actual distribution, so I am using a conservative median) is not terribly effective. Using it would put 10 times as many women at risk for an unwanted pregnancy. That’s a lot of women forced to chose between abortion and or a pregnancy they don’t want. Inevitably, more abortions will occur. Not a good plan if NOT setting the stage for abortions is your goal.

Abortion is a hard choice, but it is not your place or mine to make that choice for another being.

It’s lack of information that is part of the reason there are so many elective surgical abortions. It is a shame you are illustrating the very point I’ve been making about pro-choice not really being about advocating choices that actually reduce elective abortion (since that would require getting informed about their existence).

Abortion is at a bare minimum physically unpleasant and a surgical invasion of the body. Why anyone would want to encourage this option when so many options exist to prevent *conception* remains a mystery to me.

I don’t understand how Roe is coercive. Could you explain that for me? It doesn’t coerce anyone to have an abortion. It only prevents people from being coerced into NOT having an abortion, at least before the fetus is viable (Casey).

I am sure you are aware that the anti-abortion position is often caricatured as caring about people only before they are born. Taking positions that you will cease health care for millions before you will allow a legal procedure to be done in your facility feeds directly into that caricature.

I will agree with you on one point , at least in principle if not yet in practice, that RvW implies that if a woman wants to terminate her pregnancy at ANY time, that should be her choice, and hers alone. That does not, by itself, imply that the fetus will not survive. Most pregnancies actually terminate with a live baby, once the fetus is viable, however they are terminated.

The statistics on ‘fertility awareness”, as you further describe the phrase, and from recollection only, are not good. In fact, the risk of pregnancy is so high as to be unacceptable if abortion is not an option.

Given that the catholic church has considered sex for pleasure a sin, it is little difficult to consider the church an honest broker in this discussion.

there is something very unpleasant about the face that abortion-focused planned parenthoods are located overwhelmingly in poor, minority (usually black) neighborhoods, while planned parenthoods focused more on ‘women’s health’ are not.

in light of the strong Catholic origins of much of what we know consider ‘fertility awareness/natural family planning’, it’s quite telling to see the disregard of a chemical-free, cheap birth control method that reduces incidence of elective surgical abortion in a discussion about whether Catholic doctors should be coerced into performing elective surgical abortion.

a more honest argument from public good would start with reducing unnecessary surgical interventions (‘first do no harm’), of which abortion can certainly be said to frequently fall under.

And mind you, I still respect the primacy of a woman’s ownership of her body. These are ancillary arguments in my view.

As for hospitals, it depends upon funding. I don’t think it kosher for institutions to take public money but adopt policies that unreasonably discriminate against at least some part of that same public. If Catholic hospitals receive no Federal or State funding, I think they can choose what kind of procedures they perform. If, as may be the case in some places, they are the only provider in a community, I am not sure that the public good doesn’t require a modification of that position.

Frankly, when I see some pro-choice advocacy of fertility awareness/nfp (which would reduce incidence of elective abortion), then I’d feel a bit differently about the pro-choice position, which one must admit focuses in practical terms on abortion access specifically and very little else.

The pro-choice rhetoric of ‘clumps of cells’ and such is hardly the kind of language that will make people believe one is pro-any choice other than elective, surgical abortion.