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ou know, I’m thinking maybe I’ve been wrong about abortion. Maybe it really is a woman’s right to choose. Can every hip person in the universe be wrong?

A cultural wave is cresting, and I feel like a geek among the surfers. In a single weekend, the worlds of fashion and Hollywood sent forth powerful signals that this battle was finished some time ago. Out of my Sunday morning New York Times fell a glossy advertorial from Kenneth Cole, the thinking woman’s cobbler, asserting his pro-choice sentiments with a witty visual/textual pun equating a fetus with a handbag (“Isn’t it a woman’s right to choose? After all she’s the one carrying it” was the caption beneath a come-hither-eyed, purse-toting babe). The boldness and candor of the metaphor — the unborn child as accessory! — could only have sprung from the confidence of absolute conquest.

And then there was John Irving, thanking the Academy for honoring his script on the “abortion subject,” as he termed it, and lauding Miramax “for having the courage to make this movie in the first place.” Yeah, it took Zeitgeist-busting guts to buck that Tinseltown tide of anti-abortion fervor. Now Miramax can cop out and go back to making all those safe, pro-life box-office hits. (How about Julia Roberts as a spunky working-class Catholic manicurist who convinces her client — Susan Sarandon as an ambitious feminist attorney — not to end her pregnancy, and they both wind up overturning Roe v. Wade?)

Irving even thanked NARAL, to a thunderous surge of glitterati applause. For NARAL, it’s been one heck of a victory lap recently, with the Democratic candidates falling over themselves to pledge allegiance. Not long ago, NARAL was just a bunch of cranks, the left-wing mirror image of the strident pro-lifers, the Coat Hanger Crew versus the Dead Baby Doll Brigade. Somebody finally got them some decent advertising creative and PR, and now they’re at all the right parties. Even the partial-birth abortion campaign, which was a brilliant bit of strategy, came too late to halt the momentum. That dead-baby thing is so over.

And I’m tired of being at the loser’s table. I want to be able to imagine that I could party with movie stars and screenwriters and pocketbook designers without having to bite my tongue and avoid the Subject. I’ve never been one to hang around clinics protesting, but if I open my mouth, I might as well be a clinic bomber, and it’s getting me down. What’s left of my youth is slipping away, and if I’m going to rock for Choice, I’d better do it soon.

The only hitch will be learning the vocabulary until it comes naturally. “Products of conception.” “Contents of the uterus.” Those are the easy ones; as a medical writer, I’m used to clinical doubletalk. “Right to my own body,” however, will take some practice. I’ve been pregnant, and I could’ve sworn at times that there were two of us — long before I was as far along as Annette Bening. I’ve got to just start thinking, I was “carrying it.” Like a handbag. A really hip handbag, the kind that would look good at the Academy Awards.

I feel more popular already.

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