I’m naïve, but I’d like to think people on both sides of the abortion issue would like for there to never need to be another one – ever! We could agree that prevention is better than abortion. I would hope so.
Yet there’s a doctor in California who wants to establish a $20 million floating abortion clinic off the Alabama Gulf Coast to perform abortions in international waters because she claims it will then be “legal.”
If that fits your belief system (which it does not mine), so be it, but let’s look at it in a way that everyone should be able to agree upon. Wouldn’t it be smarter and better to spend our time and resources on educating people in general – men and women – on protecting themselves from the need for such procedures and clinics?
What both sides should be able to agree on is not whose right it is, or at what month abortion is right or wrong, whose choice it is, or when life begins (though we all could debate those things.) What we should be able to agree on is educating people on protecting themselves from having to ever face such a horrible decision — life or death — because that’s what it comes down to.
Since the recent Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade, it seems a lot of people have focused enormous amounts of energy, resources and effort on how to get women from one state to another for abortions, how to keep abortion clinics open, how to circumvent the new decision and how to create floating clinics. Yet they’ve failed to recognize the one thing we should all be able to agree on – prevention is the best solution.
If safety is truly an issue for both sides, then prevention is better than abortion any day, and no floating abortion clinic or any other so-called solution is going to facilitate that – only prevention does. Maybe both sides can agree on that. I hope so.
Beth Chapman is Alabama’s former State Auditor and 51st Secretary of State. She now owns and operates Beth Chapman & Associates, LLC. This is her weekly column, “Around the Capitol” published in newspapers and blogs across the state. She can be reached at [email protected].
