Today, I spotted a link to Mary Ann Sorrentino's Blog on Salon.com. Sorrentino reports about a woman who decided to Twitter her RU486 abortion in real-time.

27-year-old Angie Jackson decided to use Twitter as a public stage for her private decision to terminate a pregnancy using RU486, the miscarriage-inducing drug legally available in the US for a decade. Jackson, who has a 4-year-old son with special needs, says that that difficult pregnancy and outcome made her decide long ago not to have another child. She was committed to aborting future pregnancies that might occur.

Sorrentino strongly disapproves of Jackson's public display of abortion. She considers it "self-serving, exhibitionistic, and selfish: at best, it has "Bad Judgment" written all over it." I agree with Sorrentino's characterization of Jackson's craving for the limelight. Before going further, however, I should make clear that I fully support a woman's right to abort a pregnancy in the early months of the pregnancy. Although I consider an early term embryo/fetus to to be both human and alive, I don't consider a human organism lacking a reasonably-developed brain to be entitled to the legal rights of personhood. As the pregnancy gets to be further along, the argument gets correspondingly stronger (in my mind) that the fetus is a person--I thus consider the idea of an elective abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 or 9 months (e.g., for sex selection) to be the ghastly equivalent of murder. Here's more on my analysis of abortion and my rejection of the religious concept of the "soul," an ancient concept that inspires many people who are anti-abortion. As I read Sorrentino's post, I thought about a question posed to me by a good friend who is anti-abortion. I mentioned to him that I believe in a woman's right to abort for any reason in the early months of pregnancy. As we discussed the issue further, I indicated that it was too bad that some women had multiple abortions--too bad there isn't fool-proof birth control--shouldn't the invention of 100% reliable birth control be a priority for our government, so that there would be fewer accidental pregnancies, and hence, abortions? My friend stopped me and asked me why I would care about large numbers of early term abortions, given my position that an early term abortion is not tantamount to murder. He asked, "If it's not murder, why do you care that a woman uses abortion repeatedly - - 10 or 12 times in her life, to end pregnancies? You're claiming that an early term abortion is only as morally significant as trapping a mouse in a mousetrap, right? . . ." [More . . . ]