Challenges for the pro-choice movement

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Frances Kissling is right that abortion rights are under attack, and pro-choice advocates are caught in a time warp. The pro-choice movement should be called the pro-family movement. Pro-lifers have ignored the profound impact that abortion policy and reproductive health policy in general have on the health of women and children.

We have known for years that when women in the developing world gain access to contraception and safe abortion, the infant, child and maternal mortality rates plummet. Even in the United States, states with regulations that allow poor women liberal access to contraceptives through Medicaid have significantly lower infant mortality rates than other states. As Ms. Kissling stated, our rates of maternal (and infant) mortality are appalling, especially when compared with other developed (and some developing) countries.

Let's put this discussion in the proper context. Let's work together for a mutually desirable purpose - improvement in maternal and child health.

Carol Roye, Pleasantville, N.Y.

The writer is assistant dean for research and a professor at Hunter College School of Nursing.

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Frances Kissling needs to wake up and realize it is 2011, and there is no longer a single pro-choice perspective: There are factions, disagreements and conversations about what the right balance is regarding abortion rights. In reality, many abortion rights supporters have moved beyond a demand for privacy to an expectation that the state take an active role in reproductive policies.

If she missed it, we call this new movement the Reproductive Justice Movement, which encompasses the right to have a child, to not have a child and to raise the children we have. But recognizing that the state has a role to play is not the same as believing that health-care regulations should be used as statements about our moral concerns with abortion. As a researcher of access to abortion, I find the evidence is clear that most abortion-related state policies do not enhance health. While waiting periods express that as a society we want women to take the decision seriously, what they really do is make poor women dig even deeper into their rent and electric bills to take off that additional day from work.

Like most health-care advocates, I support reasonable regulations that are evidence-based and do not increase health disparities. I believe we can express our disagreements over abortion without doing so in ways that harm women. Evidence, not politics, should determine how we regulate health care.

Tracy Weitz, Oakland, Calif.

The writer is a director at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health.