Hi, Marysia, we are so glad you created a reader diary! You have already been an active community member on the site and I am glad you are getting even more involved.

One question (and though I've read comments of yours many times, I don't know the answer). Do you oppose legal abortion? Or are you morally opposed to abortion but agree that it should be kept legal? Do you think working to outlaw abortion is an important goal?

Well hey, I wouldn't label you "anti-choice" by any sense of the word... anti-choice generally has a far larger scope, often encompassing opposition to sex before marriage, some or all forms of contraception, and as you mentioned, LGBT rights.

So let's get started. Being against abortion (please don't confuse that with "anti-abortion" because that evokes images of the Army of God and Operation Rescue, and is overall just a frightening image), do you believe there should be legislation passed to restrict the procedure without creating any infrastructure to further ensure unwanted pregnancies don't happen as often?

I'm glad for the second half of your advocacy, Marysia, but I hope you are focusing at least as much attention on pro-life venues. You are in a position to directly confront their anti-woman bias, and their counterproductive denegration and dismissal of healthy sexuality, without the matter of abortion distracting from that.

While we may disagree on the morality of abortion, I think it can be said that your disapproval of it is greater than that of most pro-lifers, because you are willing to take the steps that have been proven to reduce its incidence. I'm guessing eliminating abortion is more important to you than slut-shaming, or promoting abstinence-till-marriage, or pressuring women into becoming mothers. You're willing to let all of that go, for the prize you're after.

Mainstream pro-lifers need to understand, hopefully from your example, that they're really only making a half-hearted effort.

Well, I was shamed as a slut for creating a child before I was married, so I am REALLY not into that stuff!! In fact I think slut-shaming has been historically, and still remains, a major cause of abortion. Many single women feel tremendous pressure to destroy the evidence of their sex lives.

As for engaging with conservative abortion opponents, I do that, too, have done that over the years. I have especially challenged the notion of the "convenience abortion" and pointed out how that blithe dismissal of women's miseries amounts to complicity in abortion.

And sometimes I encounter nothing but negativity and ill will, but sometimes the results are positive and some human understanding happens. Just as with prochoicers.

Nonviolent Choice Directory, http://www.nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com

Honestly, my heart is in a very different place from the cultural focus on whether abortion should be legal/illegal. So my position takes some explaining.

Harry834 asked me this same question. I tried to answer him here:
http://nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com/2009/02/criminalize-abortion.html

(I didn't create that URL, and I can't change it, unfortunately.)

I would also say that I do see big problems with Roe v. Wade. It does nothing to honor and foster the claims of fetal life, the imperatives of male sexual and reproductive responsibility, and the collective responsbility to create a comprehensive social safety net for women and children, before, duirng, and ever after birth.

But overturning it--what would that accomplish? especially in a society so thoroughly desensitized to the sacred lives of women and children, after and before birth.

Whether and to what extent abortions are legal/illegal, women will have them if they don't have other choices, and generous, substantive ones. So that's where I focus, on creating those necessary, lifesaving alternatives.

Now, this is one opinion among many for prolife progressives. But I can't think of a single one who thinks that banning abortion will just make the problem all go away.

By the way, my friend Jen Roth just wrote an excellent "primer" on prolife progressives:

http://www.sharedsacrifice.us/Mar5Roth_Pro_Life_Progressives.html

Nonviolent Choice Directory, http://www.nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com