"---yeah, but yoshie, don't you get it, all those african women having abortions are baby killers anyway? i mean they are EVIL to have abortions and murderers who should be jailed for life if they don't die. I also strongly support condom distribution, needle exchanges for free, public health insurance for all, and the right to an abortion. But those women who have abortions as contraception and who have late term abortions are evil and the only way to establish legitimacy for the pro-choice position is to fall on our knees and express shame about any women having an abortion....although of course we support the right to the women having an evil abortion....as long as they feel huge amounts of guilt for doing so..."
I don't know who you're quoting or paraphrasing, but it's no one who has posted so far. I would suspect that the high incidence of death from abortion in Africa correlates with a lot of other like data from Africa and is connected to the practice of female genital mutilation (which messes up everything having to do with reproduction), inadequate health care, and poverty. None of these have anything to do with abortion per se.
I spoke of emotions in and around abortion, I mentioned grief, relief, depression...but the words "shame" and "guilt" not once.
I understand that when contraception fails, abortion happens, and I accep that, but I still think that abortion is not the best form of birth control. That's not blaming anyone or shaming anyone, it's making a plain statement about the relative merits of abortion as a contraceptime device.
A lot of people are writing to say that if you have negative emotions about an abortion it's either because you've been brainwashed or because you're a right-to-lifer. I don't think that's true. I also don't think that we are doing a service to anyone, least of all the cause for 'choice' if we cannot develop a nuanced position around this issue.
Leftists may scoff at right-wingers for their neanderthal/mythic mindsets, but I have seen a lot of that on the left too, and it's not any more enlightened. I mean, "you're either for us or against us"...where have I heard that before?"
Joanna