Most Americans don't like to think about abortion. A candidate who spends too much time talking about it runs the risk of losing touch with voters who associate abortion with grisly details. Voters may instinctively vote for the candidate who seems to be able to erase abortion from the American consciousness altogether simply by erasing it from his campaign speeches. But in the words of that sixties folk song, "you don't know what you've got till its gone," voters may wake up one day to realize that abortions, far from being banished from the American vocabulary, are being performed in back alleys. Like our mothers and fathers, they will know someone who died from an illegal abortion. It will be much harder to ignore abortion then.

Meredith B. Osborn '02, a Crimson executive, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.