Katha Pollitt’s Pro: Reclaim­ing Abor­tion Rights is a deeply felt and well-researched book which argues that abor­tion, despite what any of its oppo­nents might claim, is a pal­pa­ble social good. Pro­gres­sives, Pol­litt says, can and must treat abor­tion as an unequiv­o­cal pos­i­tive rather than a ​“nec­es­sary evil”; there is no eth­i­cal, humane way to lim­it abor­tion rights. The fact that Pol­litt needs to make this argu­ment in 2014, how­ev­er, seems to indi­cate that pro-choicers have long been a lit­tle too nice for our own good.

The way many progressives talk about abortion makes it sound like reproductive autonomy is a social faux pas, like taking the last slice of pizza at the pizza party. Not criminal, sure, but are you sure you need it?

Which is some­thing Pol­litt her­self points out, many times. There are the obvi­ous tru­isms about abor­tion ide­al­ly being ​“safe, legal, and rare,” sure. Pol­litt also cites Roger Rosen­blat­t’s for­mu­la­tion of ​“per­mit but dis­cour­age,” which makes it sound like repro­duc­tive auton­o­my is a form of social faux pas, like tak­ing the last slice of piz­za at the piz­za par­ty. Not crim­i­nal, sure, but are you sure you need it?

But the lan­guage of apol­o­gy for abor­tion has seeped ever deep­er into our language:

Any­where you look or lis­ten, you find pro-choicers falling over them­selves to use words like ​“thorny,” ​“vexed,” ​“com­plex” and ​“dif­fi­cult.” How often have you heard abor­tion described as ‘”he hard­est deci­sion,” or ​“the most painful choice” a woman ever makes, as if every sin­gle woman who gets preg­nant by acci­dent seri­ous­ly con­sid­ers hav­ing a baby, only a few weeks ear­li­er the fur­thest thing from her mind, and for very good reason?

The end of the line, Pol­litt says, is the sort of ridicu­lous deci­sion made by Planned Par­ent­hood in 2013 to move away from the term ​“pro-choice,” which ​“was itself a bit of a euphemism: Choose what?” We can hard­ly be expect­ed to defend abor­tion effec­tive­ly if we can’t even call the pro­ce­dure by name.

Pol­litt con­vinc­ing­ly out­lines the many rea­sons that abor­tion is not only nec­es­sary but good for soci­ety: ​“always a choice,” as she writes, ​“and often a deeply moral decision.”

First, and most obvi­ous­ly, if you have a uterus, your life depends on being able to con­trol what goes on inside of it; giv­ing birth nec­es­sar­i­ly rep­re­sents a dras­tic lifestyle change and heavy finan­cial respon­si­bil­i­ty, which lasts any­where from nine months to the rest of your nat­ur­al-born life. There­fore, in order to effec­tive­ly plan a life and career, you must have some guar­an­tee that you will nev­er be forced to take on the risk or cost of child­birth unless you choose to do so. Birth con­trol and abor­tion are the only ways to pro­vide such a guar­an­tee. If we are to have lead­ers and genius­es with uterus­es, we must pro­vide them with the repro­duc­tive free­dom nec­es­sary to go to school and build careers.

Preg­nan­cy is also a health risk: Women and girls can and do die from child­birth and preg­nan­cy. There are plen­ty of oth­er health risks, com­mon and uncom­mon, that attend upon preg­nan­cy. Michelle Lee, whose sto­ry Pol­litt cites in her book, required a heart trans­plant, which she could not receive while she stayed preg­nant. Yet doc­tors at Louisiana State Med­ical Cen­ter denied her the nec­es­sary abor­tion, and there­fore also the trans­plant, because the hos­pi­tal rules stat­ed that the risk of death from her preg­nan­cy had to be greater than 50 per­cent before they could abort.

Abor­tion saves lives, and even if your life is not direct­ly or imme­di­ate­ly endan­gered by your preg­nan­cy, I don’t have the right to force you to risk life and limb, or go through dras­tic and painful phys­i­cal expe­ri­ences like labor, sim­ply because I pre­fer that you stay pregnant.

And, final­ly, abor­tion pre­vents suf­fer­ing — not only the emo­tion­al, phys­i­cal and finan­cial suf­fer­ing of par­ents, but that of infants. Some fetal defects, such as bilat­er­al renal age­n­e­sis (lack of both kid­neys) or anen­cephaly (lack of an upper brain and skull) are sim­ply not sur­viv­able. We’re not talk­ing dis­abil­i­ties, we’re talk­ing death sen­tences: If the preg­nan­cy is brought to term, the child will die, usu­al­ly with­in hours or days of birth.

Any rea­son­able per­son would pre­sum­ably agree that it’s sense­less and inhu­mane to force a fam­i­ly that is already los­ing a preg­nan­cy to endure the longest and most painful ver­sion of that loss, or to con­demn a child to unavoid­able, lethal suf­fer­ing, sim­ply so that strangers can have the sat­is­fac­tion of know­ing it died out­side the womb. Yet not only do anti-abor­tion advo­cates encour­age women to car­ry non-viable fetus­es to term, Pol­litt unearths a hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ry of a 17-year-old in Peru who was denied an abor­tion by Peru­vian law, and who was there­fore forced to give birth to, and breast­feed, an anen­cephal­ic child who lived for four days.

This, along with tales of women who entered sep­sis or died because they could not receive abor­tions while they were mis­car­ry­ing, con­sti­tutes the dark end of the road for anti-abor­tion argu­ments: The cul­ture of ​“life” that anti-choice move­ments want actu­al­ly brings tragedy and death by fail­ing to rec­og­nize reality.

Pollitt’s argu­ments for abor­tion are con­vinc­ing and thor­ough. The amount of time she spends log­i­cal­ly decon­struct­ing the ​“Bib­li­cal” argu­ments against repro­duc­tive choice alone is com­mend­able. (And fun­ny: ​“The Old Tes­ta­ment is a very long book, full of bans and pro­nounce­ments and detailed instruc­tions about dai­ly life — what to wear, what not to eat, how to har­vest your crops. It con­demns many activ­i­ties. … But there is no men­tion of abortion.”)

She also out­lines, in depress­ing detail, the impact of the mis­in­for­ma­tion pro­mul­gat­ed by the anti-abor­tion lob­by, con­vinc­ing huge num­bers of women that abor­tion caus­es can­cer, or depres­sion, or sui­cide. Yet many of those women seek out abor­tions any­way. Indeed, Pol­litt argues, the fact that women are will­ing to have abor­tions that they believe might kill them (or, in pre-Roe v. Wade times, to have ille­gal abor­tions that did kill and dras­ti­cal­ly injure them) only demon­strates how urgent and nec­es­sary abor­tion is.

And yet none of this is like­ly to con­vince dyed-in-the-wool abor­tion oppo­nents. Dis­man­tling fetal ​“per­son­hood” with log­i­cal or sci­en­tif­ic (or even Bib­li­cal) argu­ments does noth­ing to con­vince those who believe a fer­til­ized egg is a human being, because those beliefs have nev­er been found­ed on log­ic or sci­ence. They’re emo­tion­al. You can’t argue emotions.

But you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to respect them, either — par­tic­u­lar­ly not when they require you to behave in ways that cause harm.

Pollitt’s most pierc­ing argu­ment is that pro­gres­sives have giv­en too much ground on this issue, to their own detri­ment: ​“For years,” she writes, ​“a robust school of pro­gres­sive think­ing called women who were alarmed about the future of repro­duc­tive rights naïve. The Repub­li­can Par­ty isn’t seri­ous about restrict­ing abor­tion, they claimed, politi­cians just talk like that to keep the base motivated.”

This isn’t ancient his­to­ry; Thomas Frank’s What’s the Mat­ter with Kansas?, one of the books she cites as hav­ing argued this, appeared in 2004 and was a best­seller through­out that decade. We argued that abor­tion oppo­nents weren’t real­ly seri­ous right up until the time that we found our­selves fight­ing not only for legal abor­tion, but for the con­tin­ued legal­i­ty of birth control.

In oth­er words, try­ing to be com­pas­sion­ate, to give anti-choicers the ben­e­fit of the doubt, has only result­ed in pro­gres­sives fail­ing to make their own case. We’re deal­ing, Pol­litt says, with ​“40 years of apolo­getic rhetoric, 40 years of search­ing for argu­ments that will sup­port legal abor­tion while nev­er, ever imply­ing that it is an easy deci­sion or a good thing,” and this has only got­ten us stuck ​“mak­ing the same lim­it­ed, defen­sive argu­ments again and again.”

Pro­gres­sives have apol­o­gized for being right. But we don’t have to. Abor­tion saves lives, improves lives, and makes for a stronger soci­ety. The facts are deci­sive­ly on our side.

Most pro­found­ly, Pollitt’s book is a call for us all to reclaim and speak out about the truths we know. Per­son­al­ly, I like abor­tion. I’ve nev­er need­ed one. I’m still glad to have the option. I’m glad for the peo­ple I’ve known who got preg­nant at the wrong time, with the wrong peo­ple, and did­n’t have their lives ruined by it.

If Pol­litt gets her way, more of us might feel free to admit that, hey: We like abortion.