Sure, legalize it and regulate it, make it a legitimate career option for women. Would you encourage your sisters or daughters to sign up?
We need to think a little more deeply than that. Legalizing and regulating prostitution doesn't really solve much, it still leaves the women as victims. I can't presume to speak for women as a group, but I find it hard to believe that many women would choose a life of prostitution unless they perceived it as a matter of raw survival and they had no other options.
I'm inclined to think prostitution is an artifact of what we are pleased to call civilization. I've never heard of anything like it existing in hunter-gatherer societies, but this is really a complex debate I don't have the knowledge to understand fully, so I won't take that any farther than simply raising the matter.
Ask yourself this though: regular medical attention for prostitutes, who is that really intended to protect? The pimps who have an economic interest in keeping them healthy, and the johns who use their services. It doesn't protect the prostitutes from disease, it merely puts them out of business to prevent them spreading it when they get one and, we'd hope, provides treatment. If there is one.
If we really want to protect the prostitutes, the johns should be subjected to a medical inspection, which they should pay for, before they're allowed to visit a prostitute, including a waiting period until the results are determined; it takes a while to get results from a bacteriological test. They're the ones who bring the diseases in, so make them responsible.
More broadly, I think we need to examine what the women's movement's been saying for...well, certainly for all of my adult life...about the status of women, gender roles, and all the rest of it, very carefully, 'cause I think it's on to something important, and the continuing existence of prostitution is part of it.
