Jessica of Feministing has an outstanding interview with Katha Pollitt in the current Salon. Among her usual refreshingly clearsighted remarks, Pollitt touches on the clicheic put-downs of feminists as “strident” and overly political. What she had to say touched an important nerve for me:

Well, do black people, do Latinos, do workers go around saying, “Oh no! Our leaders are so strident! Someone just wrote a strident book defending my rights!” . . .
[W]hen we talk about abortion, how often do we talk about it in terms of women’s lives? As opposed to it being about a fetus being a person. The anti-choicers have so thoroughly switched the conversation over to the question of the personhood of the fertilized egg or fetus that now it’s even a person before it’s implanted in your uterus!

This came right on the heels of my stumbling across another old cliche of the abortion-rights fight: “There are no easy answers in the abortion debate.” The two together put me onto a line of thought that I want to spin out a bit:

There certainly are easy answers about abortion, and it’s time we damn well insisted they be recognized.

(more…)