Guest guest Posted January 24, 2004 Report Share Posted January 24, 2004 Remembering Roe http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17634 By Joanne Mariner, FindLaw.com January 22, 2004 Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court opinion whose 31st anniversary falls today, was not yet a decade old when I became pregnant. I was 17, living on my own, and the pregnancy was unwanted. Since graduating from high school I had passed through a succession of menial, low-paying jobs: selling women's clothing at a store in the local mall, working as a waitress, and the most mind-numbingly tedious of all, making rubber skateboard wheels in a machine shop. My savings were nil. With my pay stubs, proof of residence, and the dismaying results of a pregnancy test, I paid a visit to the welfare office and qualified for emergency Medi-Cal, California's program for the public funding of medical care. The abortion procedure was fast and relatively painless. I faced a couple of anti-abortion protesters in the parking lot when I arrived that morning – they held up pictures of fetuses for my inspection – but they were gone by the time I left. My recovery from the procedure was quick and without complications. The enormous sense of relief I felt after the operation has, over the years, ripened into gratitude. I was lucky that legal abortion was available and doubly lucky that the state of California was willing to fund it. Today not every woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is so fortunate. Mounting Restrictions Even though, as the Supreme Court said in 1992, " an entire generation has come of age free to assume Roe's concept of liberty, " the right to a safe and legal abortion remains under threat. According to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 335 anti-choice measures have been enacted since 1995. President Bush has openly endorsed the goal of banning abortion, and some of his federal judicial picks have been anti-abortion zealots, a worrying indicator for his possible future nominees to the Supreme Court. Publicly funded abortion is not available in most states, except in narrow cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. Since 1977, federal law has prohibited Medicaid from paying for the abortions of low-income women in most circumstances. Because fewer than half of all states offer supplemental funding that goes beyond these federal limitations, the possibility of abortion is foreclosed to many poor women. Mandatory parental consent or notification rules, which exist in more than 30 states, deter many teenagers from exercising their constitutional right to a legal abortion. Minors with abusive parents may risk physical or emotional harm if required to disclose their pregnancies. Judicial bypass procedures, which the Supreme Court has ruled must be included in parental consent and notice laws, may be ineffective when the reviewing judge is hostile to abortion. Numerous procedural restrictions continue to impede women's access to abortion. Now, in 20 states, women seeking abortion face mandatory delays in obtaining the procedure, a requirement that is often paired with the obligation of receiving state-dictated informational materials designed to discourage abortion. Such rules particularly burden women who live long distances from abortion providers, or whose transportation arrangements are difficult. Other state laws target doctors who perform abortions, imposing complicated regulatory schemes. The latest effort to hobble reproductive rights has been to redefine what constitutes an abortion, via legislation like the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Although the Supreme Court struck down the most restrictive of these laws, adopted in Nebraska, others have passed lower court scrutiny. Although they are supposed to cover only late-term abortions, the imprecise and unscientific language of such laws means that their scope threatens to extend far beyond the situations cited by their supporters. Roe's Beneficiaries In campaigning to limit or deny reproductive rights, anti-abortion activists have devised not only new strategies but also new justifications. No longer focused solely on fetal rights, the anti-abortion lobby now professes concern for " post-abortion victims " – that is, women who have undergone abortions. Abortion, in this view, causes inevitable emotional trauma. The denial of abortion has accordingly been recast as a means to save women from a lifetime of psychic pain and regret. Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this new dogma is Norma McCorvey, the original plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. McCorvey, though, never obtained an abortion; the ruling she is known for came too late for that. And Roe, importantly, was a class action, litigated on behalf of an open-ended group of women seeking to end their pregnancies. McCorvey may have changed her mind, but many of us who benefited from her legal fight have not. As a fortunate heir to the right she helped establish, I have no regrets about my choice. And I know there are many more women like me who will, on this anniversary, remember their debt to Roe. Joanne Mariner is a human rights attorney and columnist for FindLaw.com. « Home « Top Stories Print Get a print-friendly version of this story. Also in Top Stories Stereotypes and Archetypes By Deborah Siegel Jan 23, 2004 CBS: 'No' to MoveOn, 'Yes' to White House By Timothy Karr Jan 22, 2004 The New American Century By Arundhati Roy Jan 22, 2004 The Hidden State of the Union By George Lakoff Jan 22, 2004 IVINS: Thoughts on Iowa By Molly Ivins Jan 22, 2004 Read other stories by Joanne Mariner We're Not Sorry By Jennifer Baumgardner, The Nation January 21, 2004 Last January 22, the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Patricia Beninato was annoyed. It seemed that every time she turned on the news, anti-choicers were yelling about babies being slaughtered or erroneously claiming that women who have abortions are destined for clinical depression. " I had an abortion, " thought Beninato, a 37-year-old customer-service rep in Richmond, Virginia, " and I'm glad I did. Someone should put up a website for women who had abortions and don't regret it. " She happened to be between jobs, so Beninato decided she would be that someone. Thus, ImNotSorry.net was founded – and has since gathered more than 100 stories. When she researched what was already out there before launching the site, Beninato found only anti-choice counseling outfits like afterabortion.com and Rachel's Vineyard ministry, which offer misleading medical information and propaganda from women who describe being coerced into abortion by controlling older boyfriends and Planned Parenthood " salespeople. " Indeed, the real voices of women who have had abortions are hard to find, despite the fact that there are more than a million abortions a year, and many millions of American women who have had one or more. Because it's a private moment, often a sad and stressful moment, the sheer mass of women who have had abortions and are glad is invisible. Even closeted. The media bear this out – while there is no shortage of pro-choice activists making demands for preserving safe legal abortion, hardly any coverage features women who are " out " about having had an abortion. Women are perhaps even quieter than they were pre-Roe, when at least a few hundred feminists held speak-outs and signed public petitions about their illegal abortions. Meanwhile, the Texas Justice Foundation, an anti-choice group dedicated to protecting women from the " tragedy of abortion " and the " physical, emotional and spiritual damage " it invariably causes, has been collecting affidavits from women who regret their abortions. Earlier this year, Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe, whose change of heart has made her the darling of the anti-choice crowd, included the affidavits when she filed a petition in court to have Roe overturned. Her petition was rejected, but the PR strategy behind it should not go unanswered: It's time to tap into the well of women who have had abortions and don't regret it. Moved by Beninato's phrase, I have been working on a campaign to recast the Roe anniversary, January 22, as I'm Not Sorry Day. The campaign consists of three elements: a film directed by Gillian Aldrich documenting women's experiences with abortion, T-shirts that read I Had an Abortion and a postcard that lists such resources as unbiased post-abortion counseling and the National Network of Abortion Funds. The message of the day is that women might have complex, or even painful, experiences with abortion, but they are still confident they made the right decision and adamant that it had to be their decision to make. The response has been amazing. In an effort to think of people I could hit up whom I hadn't already tapped out, I wrote letters to my mother's friends in Fargo, North Dakota. Within days, half the women had responded with long letters, some criticisms and plenty of checks. An e-mail that feminists Rosalyn Baxandall (who participated in the original 1969 speak-out) and Katha Pollitt sent to friends raised nearly all the money I needed to get the film going in less than two weeks. A mention of the project in Katha's " Subject to Debate " column elicited forty-eight incredible abortion stories from women around the country. The Third Wave Foundation agreed to fund the T-shirts, and women from Philadelphia, St. Paul and Columbus, Ohio, offered to buy and distribute the shirts. The January 22 event will also serve to garner support for the March for Women's Lives in Washington, DC, on April 25. Originally called Save Women's Lives: March for Freedom of Choice, the name was changed to reflect a broadened coalition of co-sponsors, including Black Women's Health Imperative, and an agenda that expands beyond " choice " to address the problem of limited access to reproductive healthcare, especially among poor, young and minority women. As we gear up for another election cycle, it's crucial to understand abortion rights in terms of women's most basic ability to live in freedom – or even to live, period. After all, legalizing abortion immediately ended once-common killers of pregnant women like septicemia and bleeding to death from an amateur D and C. " Legalizing abortion was a public health advance on a par with the polio vaccine, " says women's health writer Barbara Seaman. If abortion were connected to actual women – people like my friend Amy Richards, who had an abortion at 18 and a selective reduction last year when she found she was pregnant with triplets, or Nancy Flynn, who was a single mom finishing her BA at Cornell when she had an abortion and who told me she would " never have been able to have the rich life I've had and help my son as much as I have if I'd been the single mother of two children " – perhaps the mounting restrictions wouldn't pass so handily. To paraphrase the late poet Muriel Rukeyser: What if women told the truth about their abortions? Even if the world didn't split open, this paralyzing issue might. Jennifer Baumgardner is the co-author of " MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. " « Home « Top Stories Print Get a print-friendly version of this story. Also in Top Stories Stereotypes and Archetypes By Deborah Siegel Jan 23, 2004 CBS: 'No' to MoveOn, 'Yes' to White House By Timothy Karr Jan 22, 2004 The New American Century By Arundhati Roy Jan 22, 2004 The Hidden State of the Union By George Lakoff Jan 22, 2004 IVINS: Thoughts on Iowa By Molly Ivins Jan 22, 2004 Read other stories by Jennifer Baumgardner http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17629 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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