endy Kaminer's column in the American Prospect is one of the things that make that biweekly magazine worth reading. Conservatives will usually disagree with her conclusions, but her reasoning is always interesting and admirably tough-minded. And occasionally, that reasoning leads her to conclusions that conservatives will find congenial.

Her latest column, "Abortion and Autonomy" (in the June 5 issue), confronts a number of truths that supporters of legal abortion mostly ignore. One such truth is that clinic-access laws can violate freedom of speech. She writes, "Women and girls seeking abortions have a right not to be criminally harassed or blocked from entering clinics. But they have no right not to be upset, offended, or even traumatized by abortion protests."

Kaminer is also willing to acknowledge that public opinion does not back abortion rights nearly as strongly as NARAL and co. suggest. Citing a 1998 New York Times survey, she writes: "Professed public support for abortion in the first trimester is 61 percent; but it drops to 15 percent in the second trimester, and people seem inclined to prohibit abortions, whenever, if women seek them for the 'wrong' reasons. (It's worth noting that these were not new findings. A 1989 Times poll showed slightly stronger support for abortion rights but a similar pattern of discomfort with them.)… There was strong majority support only for women who obtain abortions because their own health is endangered or because of a strong chance of birth defects."

What Kaminer makes of this is that the public is ambivalent about the role of women. Opposition to abortion can't be based on "a deep-seated belief that a three- or four-month-old fetus is a person," she argues: "When the great majority of people surveyed believes that abortion is an acceptable choice for women who carry defective fetuses, then the great majority doesn't really consider the fetus a person. Most Americans, after all, would not suggest that parents have the right to kill their disabled children." The "view of abortion as murder seems mostly hypothetical."

Of course, one could look at the same survey data — the fact that strong majorities only support abortion rights in cases of fetal defect or a risk to the mother's health — and conclude that it's public support of abortion rights that's "mostly hypothetical": Such cases account for less than 10 percent of all abortions. Nor does it seem fair to conclude that it's patently illogical to think that abortion is a tragedy to be avoided but that having a severely disabled child without being ready to cope is a greater tragedy. That's not my own view, but neither is it absurd.

But let's assume that view is illogical. Why should that discredit the sincerity with which it is held? The principal mistake analysts make when interpreting poll data about abortion is to seize on the data that seem to confirm the picture of a "pro-choice majority." But the second mistake is the one Kaminer makes: to demand that public opinion on abortion conform to the requirements of propositional logic even when it doesn't. The truth is that the public doesn't like to think about abortion. Of course its views will seem illogical to a rigorous moral philosopher. But when describing public opinion, public ambivalence should be respected rather than resolved.

Kaminer is no Naomi Wolf. Wolf wrote an influential article in the New Republic in 1995 arguing that feminists should acknowledge that abortion is the deliberate taking of human life and therefore raises serious moral issues. Wolf was unable to adduce any persuasive reasons for keeping abortion legal anyway, and hardly tried. Kaminer, without mentioning Wolf by name, writes that feminists who have announced their doubts about the morality of abortion have let down the cause by "contribut[ing] to public discomfort with abortion rights."

Instead, Kaminer says, feminists should defend female autonomy "outright and unapologetically." Her role model is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose essay "The Solitude of the Self," writes Kaminer, "should guide the pro-choice movement." She quotes Stanton for the proposition that women "had to assume responsibility for their own lives."

Fine. But part of responsibility, for Stanton as for Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull, was rejecting abortion. If contemporary feminists really want to return to the values of their foremothers, they should rethink their support for abortion on demand.