A Deadly Confusion

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
by Katha Pollitt
Picador, 2015
(258 pages, $16.00, paperback)

reviewed by Howard Isaac Williams

Pro is part of a new front opened by abortion advocates who assert that, instead of being considered a necessary evil, abortion should be celebrated as a benefit for society. The book, however, offers nothing to prove this. Its author is a poet, essayist, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright scholar and longtime columnist for The Nation. That an intelligent author can produce no better case than this that abortion is a social good is a reflection of the weakness of the assertion.

Pro makes three main arguments: (1) that the "concept of personhood" of human fetuses "makes no sense" . . .

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Howard Isaac Williams lives in San Francisco, where he attends St. Sergius Orthodox Church. He is semi-retired from the messenger and pest control industries.

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more on abortion from the online archives

27.2—March/April 2014

The Rights of Aphrodite

on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker

30.3—May/June 2017

Known Trespassing

on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart

26.1—Jan/Feb 2013

The Destroyer of Peace

on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn

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