Cake

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton moved on Tuesday to shift the debate over abortion rights to the subject of access to family planning services, saying that the nation's focus should be on preventing unwanted pregnancies.

"Let us unite around a common goal of reducing the amount of abortions," the senator said. "Not by making them illegal as many are attempting to do, or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions."

The debate should be framed in these terms - anti-choicers who, while adamantly opposed to abortion rights, have resisted efforts to pay for programs providing greater access to contraception and other family planning services that would in turn decrease the need for abortion in the first place. For example, the Bush administration has failed to provide adequate money for government family planning programs, as well as for refusing to approve over-the-counter sales of Plan B, an emergency contraceptive.

Mrs. Clinton said that the Food and Drug Administration's refusal to approve the Plan B contraceptive was a prime example of the "Washington Republican war on contraception."

"Let's really understand what we're up against," she said. "This is not just about Roe, this is not just about choice, this is about contraception, family planning and, most profoundly, women's roles and responsibilities and rights."

"But today," she continued, "the U.S. continues to have one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies in the industrialized world. Half of the six million pregnancies are unintended, and nearly half of those end in abortion every year."

Jeers to that.