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“There is the little girl who heard a story about her grandmother’s best friend, a long time ago, a friend who aborted her pre-wedding pregnancy with some implement found on the farm, because getting pregnant before marriage made a woman into a whore and a slut and she would be ostracized for the rest of her life. Instead, she was buried in her wedding dress before the scheduled wedding date. The story was told to the little girl for a different reason, perhaps, but what she took away from it was the idea that a world that puts such pressure on women is horribly wrong. And she wondered why there was no pressure to ostracize the man….
And she saw where the “pro-life” logic leads: “Once someone makes the decision that the embryo is at least as important as the woman with the uterus, well, we are going to build the adversarial approach between the two, and doctors, lawyers and politicians will all walk into our uteri, with little suitcases full of rulebooks….
