I saw a news summary last night praising Hilary Rodham Clinton's "new" position on abortion, that it must remain a woman's right, but that the preferred number of abortions each year is zero. Everyone was fawning all over this great framing, but it's exactly the same as what her husband said: "Safe, legal, and rare." Saletan can convince himself all day that HRC means "safe, legal, and never," but Ayelet Waldman's brave essay in Salon today puts the lie to that. Go. Read now. Sit through the damn ads if you have to.

I also know a woman who had two "partial-birth abortions," or D&Xs (dilation and extraction) as they are more accurately called. My friend Tiffany is a carrier of a terrible genetic abnormality. In addition to other defects, her babies developed with no faces, with no way to eat or breathe. They were doomed. The only way to extract them without hurting her chances of ever having another baby was through a D&X.

Tiffany named her children. She mourned and mourns their deaths. She is the face of the "partial-birth abortion." If we listened to women like Tiffany, we could acknowledge the value of the babies they lost, and defend absolutely their right not to carry them full term, not to force themselves and their babies to undergo the trauma of a doomed birth.

Unless pregnancy means that women have to carry unviable babies to term, or that the woman's life is forfeit if the fetus might survive, then there will be abortions. The goal is to make sure women don't have unplanned pregnancies. Then they'd never need to be ended.