Although the "best case" scenario is "that contraception is always successful and pregnancies are always welcome," that is "not always how things turn out," columnist Anna Quindlen writes in a Newsweek opinion piece. She continues that "between the clinic demonstrations, the political discussions and the imprecations from the pulpit, too many American women have come to feel that their pelvis is public property." She adds that it is "no accident" that women who have chosen a new abortion method in the form of the pill RU-486 "cite reclaiming privacy and control as the reason."

According to Quindlen, many abortion-rights advocates viewed the pill "as the answer to the rancorous, sometimes violent atmosphere that for so long had surrounded legal abortion." However, after FDA approved the pill in 2000, the "expected rush to what were called medical rather than surgical abortions didn't happen," she writes, adding, "The public interest in RU-486 ebbed -- except among women who didn't want to be pregnant anymore, where it steadily grew." She continues, "RU-486 flies in the face of anti-abortion orthodoxies, and not simply because some physicians who have never dreamed of performing a surgical abortion have no qualms about making the medication available…