Katha Pollitt

Coming out was crucial to changing attitudes about gays and lesbians: will people feel differently about abortion if they know their mother, their aunt, or their friend had one?

Women who have abortions are people you know. Because that is the truth! One in three American women will have an abortion by menopause.

The notion that female initiative is useless because men know what they want is particularly odd - most people don't even know what they want for dinner.

Ariel may look a lot like Barbie, and her adventure may be limited to romance and over with the wedding bells, but unlike, say, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, she's active, brave and determined, the heroine of her own life. She even rescues the prince. And that makes her a rare fish, indeed, in the world of preschool culture.

Most Americans probably have no idea how hostile anti-abortion sidewalk counseling outside clinics can be. There's a reason pro-choicers volunteer to escort patients as they make their way past angry crowds to the clinic door.

Do men drop out of college because they get someone pregnant? Do they quit their job if they get someone pregnant? No. And we do not require men to support women they have made pregnant. Once the baby is born, there can be child support. Before that, though, no.

Since 'Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights' came out, I've done a fair amount of public speaking, and the two statistics that always make the audience sit up are that nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by menopause and 61 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers.

In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state.

Sure, men like a challenge - but so do women. And nobody likes to be challenged all the time. I know plenty of long-standing happy couples who slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding.

Abortion opponents know full well that the public would not abide putting women in prison en masse. Politically, it's more palatable to portray them as irrational, ignorant, and childlike, perhaps even temporarily insane.

Opposition to abortion was one of the ways the Christian right was brought into the Republican Party by conservatives hoping to move the party further right. Now, of course, the tail is wagging the dog.

I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and email for women to tell me their stories about their abortions. And many women said, 'I told my boyfriend I was pregnant, and that was the last I ever heard of them.'