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Commentary: Roe v. Wade turns 37
Lily Bixler is our new intern at Current News. She'll be blogging on the News Blog regularly.
Thirty-seven years ago the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to abortion. Over the years, the right has worked its way into the fabric of our society--so much that we tend to take it for granted. When this time of year rolls around we're supposed to commemorate the efforts of all the second wave feminists who worked their tails off for the ability to plan when and how to have our families. However, we often forget to challenge our government's slow infringement upon this constitutional right. But, wait, don't all look at once: they might catch on that we know. The fact is we're far from crossing this one off our collective “to-do” list. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider, according to NARAL Pro-choice, the reproductive rights advocacy group. What does it all boil down to? This basic human right is under attack on many fronts.
In the courts: Yesterday the trial began for a pro-life fanatic from Kansas City, Mo. named Scott Roeder for the premeditated, first-degree murder of Wichita physician Dr. George Tiller. Roeder told The Associated Press in November that he was driven by religious zeal to shoot Tiller in order to protect unborn children. For 33 years Dr. Tiller defended women's constitutional right to access safe abortion care. "Abortion is about women's hopes and dreams,” he said. “Abortion is a matter of survival for women."
In Congress: After four months of debate around health care reform, its still unclear if our leadership can stand up against Catholic Bishops and Congressman Bart Stupak whose efforts in health care legislation have worked to chip away at abortion rights. The Stupak-Pitts Amendment, as it's called, prohibits federal funds "to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion."
Where does the president stand? The last few presidents have used the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to make a statement about their stance on abortion rights by flip-flopping America’s policy on the global gag rule. The “gag rule” denies American funding for HIV/AIDS clinics, birth-control providers and other organizations that council about abortion to countries that even mention abortion to women with unplanned pregnancies. This policy has become a political punching bag for incoming presidents. But last year, Obama broke the cycle and reversed the order several days after Roe v. Wade anniversary in an attempt to disrupt the political bantering.
Abortion protesters continue to rouse their dissent. This weekend March for Life activists marched the National Mall, the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill to promote anti-abortion legislative action. The pro-life advocacy group thinks the "life of each human being shall be preserved and protected from that human being's biological beginning," according to the organization’s Web site.
In the shadow of this year’s anniversary is the death of a leader of the reproductive rights movement. On Thursday, Ruth Proskkauer Smith died at 102 years old. Smith advocated for women’s access to birth control in the 1940s, and in the late 1960s she co-founded NARAL pro-choice, a reproductive rights organization that helped shape the kind of culture that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. It's easy to brush off abortion as a fixture among our reproductive options, because most of us don't remember a time when things were any different, but our political climate constantly drops little reminders that this right is as delicate as ever.
Recently on the Current News Blog:
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- afitzgerald
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- 2 years ago
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Weekly Pulse: Obama Signs Health Reform Bill, Backlash Begins
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Yesterday, President Obama signed health care reform into law. As Mike Lillis explains in the Washington Independent, the bill now proceeds to the Senate for reconciliation. The whole process could be complete by the end of the week. Republicans and their allies have already moved to challenge reform in court.
Legal challenges
The fight is far from over, however. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that Republicans have already filed papers to challenge health care reform in court. The Justice Department has pledged to vigorously defend health care reform, according to Zach Roth of TPM Muckraker.
The legal arguments against health care reform center around the constitutionality of an individual mandate, i.e., the requirement that everyone must carry health insurance. This argument is specious. The bill characterizes the mandatory payments as a tax, and imposes a fine for those who don’t pay their insurance tax. There is no question that Congress has the authority to levy taxes in support of the general welfare and providing health insurance to the people easily meets that legal criterion.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent reviews some of the other formidable legal barriers to challenging health care reform in court. But take heart, teabaggers! Birther-dentist-lawyer Orly Taitz is on the case.
Violent outbursts from reform opponents
Some anti-reform activists have resorted to intimidation. Five Democratic offices were vandalized in the days surrounding the House vote, as Justin Elliott reports for TPM Muckraker. Someone hurled a brick through the window of the Niagara office of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the chair of the powerful House Rules Committee.
Slaughter is notorious on the right for drawing up the controversial “deem and pass” strategy for moving the bill forward. Her plan was never put into action, but she has become a target anyway. Another Democratic office in Slaughter’s district was damaged by a brick bearing a quote from conservative icon Barry Goldwater: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
Elliott notes that a conservative blogger in Alabama is doing his best to incite similar attacks, though it’s not clear whether he instigated any of the original five:
…Blogger Mike Vanderboegh has been tracking the breaking of windows at Dem offices after issuing a call Friday: “To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.“
Reproductive rights take a hit
Anti-abortion extremist Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) failed to get his ultra-restrictive abortion language inserted into the health care bill, but the final bill does impede health insurance coverage for abortion.
For example, those who choose abortion coverage will have to write two checks: One for their regular premium and one for a dollar to go into a separate abortion coverage fund. Many analysts fear that the extra hassles will discourage private insurers from covering abortion at all. Pro-choice activists were in a weaker negotiating position because, unlike Stupak and his allies, they weren’t prepared to kill health reform if their demands weren’t met.
The greater good?
Now that health care reform is safely signed into law, the pro-choice movement is stepping back and asking itself some tough questions.
In The Nation, Katha Pollitt argues that the pro-choice movement deserves to be rewarded for sacrificing its own agenda for the greater good. She suggests that the Democrats could reward the reproductive rights movement by fully funding the Violence Against Women Act, addressing maternal mortality and other policy changes to advance women’s health and freedom.
Jos of Feministing counters that with their go along to get along attitude pro-choice groups have only demonstrated that they can be ignored with impunity: “You don’t get rewarded for demonstrating a lack of political power, you get further marginalized.”
At RH Reality Check, Megan Carpentier argues that national pro-choice organization like NARAL and Planned Parenthood ceded their leverage too easily. While anti-choicers were beefing up their lobbying presence in Washington, major pro-choice groups were scaling back. Pro-choice groups compromised early and easily, perhaps because they were overly confident that their service to the Democratic cause would be rewarded in the end.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger Yesterday, President Obama signed... more-
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- 2 years ago
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Prop 4 hearing
Proposition 4 hearing at the California capital building in Sacramento,CA.-
- luminouspictures
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- 3 years ago
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Obama Walks The Abortion Minefield
For the past week, some activists in the abortion rights community have been trying to figure out why Barack Obama, a Democrat praised for his strong defense of reproductive rights, appeared to be turning soft.
Those who work on the front lines of the abortion debate couldn’t quite believe what they were hearing: Obama, in an interview with a Christian magazine, seemed to reject a mental health exception to the ban on late-term abortions. They feared that Obama, like Democrat John Kerry in 2004, was adopting a view favored by abortion opponents to appeal to conservatives.
After days of examining his initial comments and a subsequent clarification that he supports a mental health exception — as long as the woman suffers a diagnosed illness and is not just “feeling blue” — some activists are satisfied, while others are far from it or just plain confused.
“That kind of statement really feeds into the wingnut argument that women have abortions because they are frivolous about that decision, because we are having a bad hair day,” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said in an interview Wednesday. “There seems to be an information gap there.”
The confusion comes at a politically sensitive juncture for Obama, as he attempts to build credibility and a comfort level with women voters and institutional advocacy groups, including some that supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The timing exacerbated the concerns of these groups, some of which are still awaiting a personal meeting with the presumptive Democratic nominee: It followed a major push by Obama to court religious voters who hold positions at odds with these advocacy groups.
As he faces criticism from some on the left, Obama is also taking hits from the right over abortion. The Christian Defense Coalition began running print ads this week calling Obama “the abortion president.” And Republican John McCain, an opponent of abortion rights, took a dig at Obama during an Ohio town hall meeting on Wednesday, criticizing his vote against a ban on late-term abortion as an Illinois state senator.
The reaction to Obama’s statement revealed a divide in the abortion rights community, one that closely tracks the allegiances formed during the Democratic Party’s protracted primary election fight. While NOW and the Feminist Majority voiced concern over Obama's abortion remarks, two of the largest organizations dedicated to reproductive rights took a different tack and backed up Obama.
NARAL Pro-Choice America, which endorsed Obama in early May, issued a statement of support after Relevant magazine published the interview last week, saying he was a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade and his views were consistent with the landmark ruling establishing the right to an abortion. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which stayed neutral in the primary, announced its formal support of Obama on Tuesday.
Kate Michelman, a prominent women’s rights advocate who endorsed Obama in February, said Obama was not softening his long-standing support of Roe, but rather articulating his understanding that abortions in the second and third trimesters should be rare and necessitated by serious health issues.
“He was very deliberately speaking to those people who over the past 35 years have made the case that the exception to protect women’s health is a big loophole through which women can leap when they are feeling blue,” said Michelman, who headed NARAL for nearly 20 years until 2004. “Obama was making it clear that he doesn’t believe that is what women do and what the law allows.”
For the past week, some activists in the abortion rights community have been trying to... more-
- aswift1
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- 3 years ago
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- 13 comments
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Cause-Texting
Yesterday, Verizon had said they would not allow NARAL Pro Choice America, the leading pro-choice group in the country, to use their networks to send text messages for subscribers who wanted to sign up for them. Today, they blamed that decision on an old policy that was written before texting was mainstream and when there weren't spam guards for texts. They have now decided they will let the opt-in texting from NARAL to happen.To me this seems like alarmist reporting - there's a lot of attention being given to the fact that Verizon will allow it now, as if the reversal is a political statement. Every other carrier allowed it to begin with, so Verizon adjusting their policies to keep up with the times doesn't seem like it should be big news, in my opinion.Yesterday, Verizon had said they would not allow NARAL Pro Choice America, the leading... more-
- Tori
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- 4 years ago
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