Reproductive Rights are Civil Rights

While we fight, may Dr. Kenneth Edelin Rest in Peace.  On 30 Dec, Dr. Kenneth Edelin, defender of a lady's right to choose what happens with her body, died in Sarasota, FL, at age 70 as a result of cancer.

Although numbering among his achievments becoming the first black chief resident of obstetrics and gynecolgy at Boston City Hospital, history may best remember him as Doctor convicted of manslaughter for performing an abortion after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roe vs. Wade that women have a right to control their own bodies and thus terminate their pregnancies.

When the MA Supreme Court overturned his conviction, the decision helped define the parameters of legal abortions.  After his legal fight, Dr. Edelin became a lifetime defender of women's reproductive rights.

[In the book "Broken Justice: A True Story of Race, Sex and Revenge in a Boston Courtroom," Edelin recounted the experiences of his criminal case.

["At the center of this book are the rights of women to control their own bodies, and the rights of doctors to perform legitimate and legal medical procedures," Edelin wrote. "For me, the struggles for reproductive rights for women and Civil Rights for African-Americans are intertwined and at the same time parallel. The denial of these two rights is an attempt by some to control the bodies of others. Both are forms of slavery. We must never let slavery in any form return to America."] emphasis and emphasis squared added by me.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/31/kenneth-edelin-dead-dies_n_4523143.html

Although one can always find examples of larger sterotypes, let's demolish the framework used by Republicans in state after state to restrict reproductive rights from females: they see any woman seeking an abortion as a slut, perhaps through ignorance or deliberately ignoring consequences of having sex,

Nevertheless the last time I checked, men and women enjoy carnal encounters.  Yet only women get "caught" with consequences.

Let me just guess the vast majority of women seeking abortions would rather not but have come to the conclusion that for them it amounts to the right choice.

Also, no form of birth control proves 100% effective, and the horrible act of rape can produce pregnancy. Ought we as a society force females to carry to term the child of thier rapist?  No, we as a people ought to make sure the conditions of aboption occur in a safe and humane manner.

[“Nobody likes to do abortions,” Dr. Edelin told The New York Times in 1975, “but the least we can do is make it safe and humane.”]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/us/kenneth-c-edelin-physician-at-center-of-landmark-abortion-case-dies-at-74.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&

Safe and humane for God forbid some rightwing zealot come home and find their daughter dead from trying to self induce an abortion.