Legalized abortion is extremely and unambiguously Good, and others on the Left need to be much more unapologetic (as with myself) about their support for it. Vacuum aspiration et. al. are "unpretty", I suppose, but so is every other legitimate medical practice. Abortion does not warrant the label of "necessary evil" seeing as how there is nothing immoral about terminating a fetus.
Well, I would argue that surgical abortions - like any surgical procedure - has its own risks, and it does present a physical and mental toll on women (as does pregnancy, for that matter). That's why it's important to promote birth control and pill-induced earlier abortions over surgical ones, which in a well functioning medical system will become the exception, by and large.
(Due to a quirk of Soviet history, Russia has an extremely high surgical abortion rate which in many cases is used instead of birth control.i don't think this is particularly healthy.)
It is such that the Soviet Union had more abortions than births. The irony of Soviet liberation of women was that they were then able to work jobs that afforded such a low quality of life, but at the same time could use abortions to continue working those terrible jobs. In the early days after the revolution, gender equality had women working many of the same—strenuous—jobs as men, resulting in work-induced non-pregnancies if you will.
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