In 1970, archconservative journalist John Steinbacher seethed at what he considered the worst casualty of the Sixties, a decade defined by two Democratic presidencies, expanded federal intervention in what felt like every dimension of daily life and defiant young activists sporting shaggy beards and miniskirts rejecting authority of all kinds. Unable to withstand these seismic shifts, he despaired, the American family was in grave peril.
The post The Democratic Party and the (not-so?) new family values appeared first on OUPblog.
Twenty-two years ago today, Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed outside the medical facility where he worked. This was no ordinary murder, though; Dr. Gunn was assassinated because of his profession. Dr. Gunn was an OB/GYN who provided abortion services.
The post Threats, harassment, and murder: being an abortion provider is a dangerous job appeared first on OUPblog.
By Leigh Ann Wheeler
Demonstration protesting anti-abortion candidate Ellen McCormack at the Democratic National Convention, New York City. Photo by Warren K. Leffler, 14 July 1976. Source: Library of Congress.
“My Body, My Choice!”
“Abortion Rights, Social Justice, Reproductive Freedom!”
Such are today’s arguments for upholding Roe v. Wade, whose fortieth birthday many of us are celebrating.
Others are mourning.
“It’s a child, not a choice!”
“Abortion kills children!”
“Stop killing babies!”
How did we arrive at this stunningly polarized place in our discussion — our national shouting match — over women’s reproductive rights?
Certainly it wasn’t always this way. Indeed, consensus and moderation on the issue of abortion has been the rule until recently.
Even if we go back to biblical times, the brutal and otherwise misogynist law of the Old Testament made no mention of abortion, despite popular use of herbal abortifacients at the time. Moreover, it did not treat a person who caused a miscarriage as a murderer. Fast-forward several thousand years to North American indigenous societies where women regularly aborted unwanted pregnancies. Even Christian Europeans who settled in their midst did not prohibit abortion, especially before “quickening,” or the appearance of fetal movement. Support for restrictions on abortion emerged only in the 1800s, a time when physicians seeking to gain professional status sought control over the procedure. Not until the twentieth century did legislation forbidding all abortions begin to blanket the land.
What happened during those decades to women with unwanted pregnancies is well documented. For a middle-class woman, a nine-month “vacation” with distant relatives, a quietly performed abortion by a reputable physician, or, for those without adequate support, a “back-alley” job; for a working-class woman, nine months at a home for unwed mothers, a visit to a back-alley butcher, or maybe another mouth to feed. Women made do, sometimes by giving their lives, one way or another.
But not until the 1950s did serious challenges to laws against abortion emerge. They began to gain a constitutional foothold in the 1960s, when the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) persuaded the US Supreme Court to declare state laws that prohibited contraceptives in violation of a newly articulated right to privacy. By the 1970s, the notion of a right to privacy actually cut many ways, but on January 23, 1973, it cut straight through state criminal laws against abortion. In Roe, the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU’s claim that the right to privacy must “encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” But the Court also permitted intrusion on that privacy according to a trimester timetable that linked a woman’s rights to the stage of her pregnancy and a physician’s advice; as the pregnancy progressed, the Court allowed the state’s interest in preserving the woman’s health or the life of the fetus to take over.
Roe actually returned the country to an abortion law regime not so terribly different from the one that had reigned for centuries if not millennia before the nineteenth century. The first trimester of a pregnancy, or the months before “quickening,” remained largely under the woman’s control, though not completely, given the new role of the medical profession. The other innovation was that women’s control now derived from a constitutional right to privacy — a right made meaningful only by the availability and affordability of physicians willing to perform abortions.
With these exceptions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe did little more than return us to an older status quo. So why has it left us screaming at each other over choices and children, rights and murder?
There are many answers to this question, but a major one involves partisan politics.
On the eve of Roe, to be a Catholic was practically tantamount to being a Democrat. Moreover, feminists were as plentiful in the Republican Party as they were in the Democratic Party. Not so today, on the eve of Roe’s fortieth birthday. Why?
As the Catholic Church cemented its position against abortion and feminists embraced abortion rights as central to a women’s rights agenda, politicians saw an opportunity to poach on their opponent’s constituency and activists saw an opportunity to hitch their fortunes to one of the two major parties. In the 1970s, Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist who coined the phrase “moral majority,” urged Republicans to adopt a pro-life platform in order to woo Catholic Democrats. More recently, the 2012 election showed us Republican candidates who would prohibit all abortions — at all stages of a pregnancy and even in cases of rape and incest — and a proudly, loudly pro-choice Democratic Party.
In the past forty years, abortion has played a major role in realigning our major political parties, associating one with conservative Christianity and the other with women’s rights — a phenomenon that has contributed to the emergence of a twenty-point gender gap, the largest in US history. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that we are screaming at each other.
Leigh Ann Wheeler is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University. She is co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History and the author of How Sex Became a Civil Liberty and Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post Choices and rights, children and murder appeared first on OUPblog.
Last week, as we stopped for a traffic signal, I spotted a bumper sticker that I had never seen before. I want to share it because it speaks the truth and our country needs to wake up to that truth.
Pro Choice is a lie,
Babies don't choose to die!
I remember when Rowe vs Wade took affect. At that time a woman who was unmarried and pregnant had few choices. She may not have had access to birth control. She had to carry the burden of shame, the man didn't. She probably could not get a job to support herself or if she had one she very well might lose it. She might not even be able to find a place to live because of the shame and the lack of funds.
The man was not judged for getting her pregnant nor was he held responsible for the child they conceived together. He didn't need to fear losing his job and he might even have bragged to his friends about what he had done. So it was the woman and the child who suffered.
Is it any wonder that "some" of these women turned to back alley abortionists, killing their unborn child and risking their own lives in the process? Many died. Many developed infections or other damage and found themselves unable to ever have a child.
I remember feeling sympathy for these women, stuck between a rock and a hard place that they did not create alone.
Then the Supreme Court stepped in....now our courts could have held the father responsible and forced him to support the child and provide for the woman....or they could have made it illegal to deny a woman a job or place to live because she was pregnant....but no! The Supreme Court in all of its wisdom decided that abortion would be acceptable if we could only convince people that a fetus is not a human being....that a fetus is just tissue....that this tissue isn't something living that feels pain...therefore we can rip it out of a woman's body, dismember it without the pangs of guilt for having murdered a child. Shame on them and shame on us!
Women today have many choices: abstain from sex, use birth control, carry your baby to term and give it up for adoption, or carry it to term and love it. She can pursue child support through the courts and she can continue to hold down a job and support herself and her child. Abortion shouldn't be anyone's choice. Abortion is not birth control! This is a different world, wake up!!!
By Elvin Lim
G.O.P., reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. W.A. Rogers. Source: Library of Congress.
The Republican party has traditionally been the more conservative party not only in terms of values but also in terms of organization reform. Leaders tend to be slower than their Democratic counterparts in reforming the nomination process, and voters tend to be more deferential to the last cycle’s runner-up to the winner.
What changed in the last few years was an concerted effort to democratize the Republican Party, fueled in part by the success of the Democratic nomination contest between Obama and Clinton in generating an enthusiasm gap in 2008. This included expanding proportional representation in nomination contests, and an unprecedented number of debates to the calendar. The result thus far has been chaos, restrained only in part by the overriding imperative to find a candidate who can unseat Obama. Republicans are relearning their earlier intuition that more voices don’t always lead to a coalescing chorus.
The White House understands this. One wonders if the Obama administration’s blunder about a birth-control insurance mandate on religious institutions was so poorly executed that it may actually have been perfectly timed. On the heels of the Catholic candidate Rick Santorum’s trifecta win, the administration decided to announce a controversial mandate requiring that women in religious institutions be entitled to contraception coverage in their health insurance, only to reverse this decision almost immediately. Either this was spectacularly amateur politics, or a high-risk attempt to put social issues back on the Republican primary agenda on the eve of the CPAC conference to aid Romney’s Catholic rivals. Romney ended up winning the CPAC straw poll and thereby entrenching his conservative credentials, but Santorum ended up a close second.
With barely any media attention devoted to the recent victories for gay marriage in California and Washington, the Obama campaign recognizes that the only reliable issue left for social conservatives to fight on is abortion (immigration being a sensitive topic for both parties), and this is possibly why they took the risk of taking it on. Social conservatives, for their part, were very wise to quickly connect the contraception mandate to the anti-Obamacare animus shared by other conservatives, so that God may remain relevant in an election year that will be mostly dedicated to the economy and debates about big government. This ideological fusion is Santorum’s ticket to unseating Romney — at least this is what the White House hopes — because as long as values matter, the conservative alternative to Romney will.
With no closure in sight, the Republican candidates must trudge on to Michigan and Arizona. It will not be until Super Tuesday, when the big delegates counts are at stake, before Romney’s coronation can be confirmed.
Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decl
This Saturday is the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Believe me when I say that I could write for days on the significance of the decision, and even more about recent news and the current state of reproductive rights. If I tried, I could probably recount verbatim the conversation I once had with Sarah Weddington (the lawyer who argued Roe at the young age of 26!). But I won’t. For now, I will simply offer the following excerpts from Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America by Sara Dubow. To those of you who celebrate it, I wish you the happiest of Roe Days. –Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor
For most of the twentieth century, abortion was simultaneously proscribed and practiced. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey reported that nine out of ten premarital pregnancies ended in abortion and that 22 percent of married women had had an abortion while married. In 1955, the continuing demand for abortion motivated Planned Parenthood’s medical director Dr. Mary S. Calderone to organize a conference featuring women testifying about the hardships of dangerous and unwanted pregnancies, and physicians advocating for liberalized abortion restrictions. Whereas the American Medical Association (AMA) had led the nineteenth-century movement to criminalize abortion, it was now in the vanguard in an incipient movement to legalize it. In 1960, physicians at the AMA annual convention argued that laws against abortion were unenforceable, thus undesirable, and in 1962 the American Law Institute (ALI) endorsed the liberalization of abortion laws.
* * *
Not satisfied with reforms that kept the power to grant or refuse an abortion in the hands of doctors and hospital boards, grassroots activists began advocating for the repeal of all abortion restrictions. In 1969, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was founded at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws, and the radical feminist group Redstockings held the first speak-out on abortion. In 1970, the New York state legislature legalized abortion, an act endorsed by Republican governor John D. Rockefeller. In 1971, a national poll showed that more than half of Americans favored legalizing abortion, the American Bar Association issued a statement supporting the legalization of abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in Roe v. Wade. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ended the nearly century-long prohibition against abortion in the United States. In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun made clear the Court’s desire to remove the abortion question from the abstract realms of philosophy, theology, and morality and place it in the concrete realm of law:
I wish that by some shift in solar winds or magnetic fields, Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak and Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson could have their hormones scrambled and change into women. It’s not that I’m eager to join into sisterhood with these two but it would be instructive for them to feel in their feminized gut what it’s like to have a pair of men using their legislative clout to restrict women’s reproductive health services. It’s difficult to understand what motivates men like Stupak and Nelson. Maybe they’re so angry nature didn’t give them the biological equipment to become pregnant and give birth that they’re out to get revenge by efforts to control women’s bodies. Maybe they just hate women. There’s surely a lot of that sentiment among men throughout the world. The Taliban, radical Islamists, fundamentalist Christians—they’re all the same in their anti-woman attitudes. Whatever their twisted motivation, Stupak and Nelson are among a cadre of fanatical men who lead the anti-choice brigade. If these men are enabled by a spineless Congress to succeed in their ultimate goal of banning abortion under the ruse of “health reform,” American women’s health will be pushed back to the era of coat-hanger abortions. Since I don’t believe in magic, I know there’s not even the freakiest chance that Stupak and Nelson will change into women. So my back-up wish is that they change into frogs. Forever. With no chance of becoming princes!
My second wish is for more members of Congress who will serve the people who elected them rather than the lobbyists that dump bribe money into their campaign coffers. We have some terrific Congresspersons who do stand up for the American people and who passionately care for our Constitution rather than the corporations but we need more. So I wish that in the upcoming 2010 elections, all the corporate fascists and cultural Neanderthals will be kicked out of office and more enlightened candidates elected.
I wish for a Republican party that is a true opposition party rather than a demolition party. Since Barack Obama was elected, Republicans seem to have only one item on their agenda – destroying his Presidency. There was a time when overt efforts to bring down a Presidency would have been considered treason. Today it’s just business as usual for a Republican party dominated by white right-wing fanatics and led by a venomous ex-vice-president and hate-mongering spokespersons like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Democracy needs an intelligent opposition party; right now, we don’t have one. The “party of no” is just that. All negatives, lies and fear manipulation. Nothing positive or coherent or intelligent.
On the cusp of a new decade, I wish for an end to war. I wish leaders of the world’s nations would recognize the terrible waste of war – the killings, raping, ecological destruction – so much needless suffering and misery. With commitment and leadership, economies could be profitably based on efforts that nourish life rather than on technologies that hasten death and philosophies that turn human beings into weapons of mass destruction. The human lifespan is pitifully short but it’s all we have – less than nine decades to discover and fulfill our potential, realize our hopes and dreams, raise families, and leave the planet a better place than the one we inherited. Subjugating that precious lifespan to death and destruction is the most obscene crime against nature imaginable.
Finally I wish for a powerful global movement of citizen activists that will work on all fronts – the arts, science, education, technology, politics, religion – to transform societies from death promoters to life supporters. Each individual in her/his own way CAN help to make a difference. We CAN empower each other.
So a woman-hating, American terrorist has struck again. Murdering Dr. George Tiller, a healer, in his Wichita, Kansas, church. The alleged murderer, Scott Roeder, a so-called “pro-life” advocate, has taken a life. Some anti-choice spokespersons quickly rushed to condemn Dr. Tiller’s murder, express their “shock” and attempt to disassociate themselves from this heinous crime. But they drool hypocrisy. Over the years, the antiabortionists’ inflammatory rhetoric has incited the most extremist, perverse, and maniacal among them to break the law and commit crimes.
Linking abortion to murder, genocide, and the holocaust, the anti-choice movement has done more to incite domestic terrorism against women and the medical profession than any other home-grown group.
Yes, there are many well-meaning, nonviolent people who oppose abortion. Although I disagree with their position, they have a right to their opinion. But they do not have the right to impose their views on everybody else. They do not have the right to harass women seeking medical services. They do not have the right to bomb clinics and murder doctors. While calling for “peaceful protests,” many of the movement’s leaders speak with forked tongues. Even as Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry issued a statement of shock and grief, he implied that Dr. Tiller’s murder was justified. After all, Terry said, Tiller was a “mass murderer.” It was Operator Rescue that coined the term “Tiller the killer,” which was taken up like a mantra and endlessly repeated as “Tiller the baby killer” by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.
One group, calling themselves the Army of God, are celebrating Scott Roeder as an “American hero” on their toxic website. With a variety of Biblical quotations and a ribbon of animated “hell fire,” this website condones murder and has links to several articles, such as “Why Shoot an Abortionist,” by Paul Hill, who was executed September 3, 2003, for murdering Dr. David Gunn and his bodyguard outside a women’s clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Hill is also portrayed as a hero on the Army of God’s website.
But Dr. Tiller was no killer. For three decades, he was a compassionate physician, a practitioner of family medicine, a protector of women’s legal right to control their reproductive biology.
Terrorist attacks on women and their doctors have been waged for decades in the United States. According to the National Abortion Foundation, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 10 murders, including that of Dr. Tiller, 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 619 bomb threats, and 1264 incidents of vandalism. In addition, there have been 383 death threats and 655 bioterror threats. Dr. Tiller survived an assassination attempt in 1993 and his personal information, including his address and names of family members, was posted on antiabortion websites. Such invasion of privacy is a favorite tactic of the some antiabortion groups.
The terrorism must stop. Congress must take the antiabortion terrorists as seriously as it takes Al Queda for they are no less dangerous. Like other religious extremists, the antiabortion terrorists claim they are carrying out “God’s will,” that they are on “holy” missions. George W. Bush made the same claim in leading this nation into a disastrous and unnecessary war in Iraq. One should always be wary of any movement or politician that justifies violence as the will of any god. The founding fathers, fresh from the terrors of Europe’s theocracies, provided for the separation of church and state in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Of course, the ultimate goal of the anti-choice zealots is to take away a woman’s freedom and her right to control her own body. By murdering, intimidating, and assaulting doctors, these extremists aim to terrorize doctors into closing their clinics, making abortion inaccessible. These modern-day terrorists are in line with centuries-old male-dominated efforts to control women. Incredibly, some women also support these efforts that go against their best interests.
As I have written in the new update to my book, Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates, “Although we now live in the 21st century, superstitions, practices, and attitudes from a prescientific era are still with us. Even in technologically sophisticated countries like the United States, women’s reproductive autonomy is threatened by fanatical groups that would turn back the clock on contraception, ban abortion and, in effect, make women’s bodies property of the state. . . . In line with male subversion strategies in other species, the antiabortion movement is driven largely by fundamentalist religious groups led predominantly by men.”
Unfortunately the terror tactics are working. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, the number of abortion providers has declined almost 40 percent since the peak of 1982. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider and some women are forced to travel long distances to obtain an abortion. Yet Americans support reproductive choice. A recent Gallup Poll showed that 76 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or certain circumstances.
Right now, we have a minority of hoodlums waging a terror campaign against a vital legal health service for women. It can be stopped if we the people bombard our members of Congress with calls to protect reproductive choice and treat domestic antiabortion terrorists with the same vigilance and vigor that our government exercises against foreign terrorists.
By: Cassie,
on 5/20/2009
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Health,
Law,
Religion,
Politics,
Current Events,
American History,
A-Featured,
Western Religion,
Barack Obama,
notre dame,
abortion,
pro-life,
catholicism,
Add a tag
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The 
Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. Professor Lim’s columns are usually up on Mondays, but our lovely blog editor is on vacation, so please excuse our tardiness this week. In the article below he looks at Obama and the issue of abortion. Read his previous OUPblogs here.
The pro-lifers single-mindedly protesting President Barack Obama’s receipt of an honorary degree from Notre Dame University have reduced the Catholic Catechism to a single issue. And it is precisely in the single-mindedness of such pro-life proponents that it can be showed that their concern is not, ultimately, about life.
The President is on the right side of Catholicism on immigration and the environment, just as previous Presidents Notre Dame has honored have been on the wrong side of the Church on issues like capital punishment and support for nuclear weapons. To pick on the current president is to pick one particular issue as the litmus test of a person’s contribution to advancing human excellence (the qualification for a honorary degree).
That is myopic, but worse still, many pro-lifers proffer their arguments in bad faith, or so Professor Sonu Bedi at Dartmouth argues (28:15 onwards). If opponents of abortion want to make the State compel women to carry their fetuses to term, Sonu Bedi compellingly asks: why don’t pro-lifers also demand that the State compels citizens who are uniquely situated to save a particular life to do so?
The latter are what Bedi calls “forced samaritan laws.” As Judith Jarvis Thomson made clear decades ago, a law prohibiting abortion is a forced samaritan law, because a woman considering abortion would be told by the State that she must perform her duty of preserving a life.
Fair enough. Perhaps we should legislate such a world, but the truth is we have not, and are not even trying. In the Common Law of the US, there is, in general, no duty to rescue. That is to say, no person can be held liable for doing nothing while another person’s life is in peril. In Vermont, one can be slapped with a $100 fine if one is uniquely positioned to save a life but fails to do so. Consider the glaring asymmetry of the law: $100 versus $2000-5000 in Texas if a woman is found to have undergone an illegal abortion.
Ah, but as the rejoinder goes, perhaps a woman has consented to sex and perhaps that is why she has a special duty to the child she helped create, and not so for the random passer-by who chooses not to save a drowning child. OK, (assuming consenting to sex is the same as consenting to procreation) why don’t we talk about laws alongside abortion laws that will also exact commensurate obligations on the father who also consented to the sexual intercourse that begot the child? Why are we so quick to pin consent and duty squarely on the woman seeking an abortion? Pro-lifers who seek laws against abortion but not laws for forced samaritanism are too quick to dismiss the immense physical and emotional costs of child-bearing that women have silently borne for millennia. And if they care only about protecting one type of life (and burdening only one group of people), then surely they are not, paradoxically, truly concerned about life but about something else, such as the preservation of traditional roles in the family.
If we value life, then we should dedicate our lobbying energy to saving any life writ large that is in imminent peril, and not merely the life in the womb. The burden of being pro-life should be equally born by all. Not only by women. If we are to be pro-life, then let us be pro-all-life, not just those lives that only women are uniquely privileged/burdened to save.
Legal scholar Doug Kmiec will be a guest on The Colbert Report on Thursday, April 16 on Comedy Central. Kmiec is the author of last year's Can A Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Questions About Barack Obama, a groundbreaking argument on abortion, the Catholic Church, and the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.
It's the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to privacy regarding reproductive freedom and struck down state laws that interfered with the right by criminalizaing certain conduct.
The effect of Roe v. Wade was to make abortion legal in most regards in the U.S. And the effect of that was to create a national divide between those who agree with legalized abortion and those who oppose it.
I was raised Catholic and grew up when world events swirled around me with a decidedly feminist air. The conflict in beliefs and perspectives between these influences has made me think about this issue in various ways at various times in my life.
I can't help myself, but I now accept the Catholic notion that life begins at conception and abortion is a mortal sin. Like murder, and other such repugnant actions, abortion moves us in a direction that is less holy, less noble.
I fully recognize the right of the Church to make drastic rulings in support of its teachings, like its automatic excommunication of Catholics who procure or obtain abortions.
But I also am schooled in law and the American ideals that value separation of church and state. What I believe as a matter of faith does not have to be the law that my government embraces, as long as that government allows me to practice my faith. Not every mortal sin must be a crime. We have decriminalized adultery. We allow divorce. There is no law against couples living together without benefit of marriage.
And I can't help but recognize that women may have moral reasons for wanting abortions, have their own religious or ethical reasons that differ from mine--that pregnancy and birth may threaten a woman's life and choosing her own life is a moral decision; that having an unwanted child may be as immoral as having an abortion; that the decision to have a child you can't afford has an ethical dimension to it.
I think the government should not be in the business of compelling one moral choice over another moral choice, unless that is necessary for a just society, for health and safety, for order and peace. I think the last three dozen years has shown that we can live with abortion rights.
And recognizing abortion rights does not necessarily lead to more deaths than making abortion illegal.
The latest information shows that fewer women are getting abortions now than at any time since 1974. There is a good blog post with facts about reproduction and family planning services at this slow-loading site. (Don't be put off by the blog header, either, please.)
Although the numbers and rate of abortion are at their lowest, the rate of decline has slowed. And a trend in reduction of family planning services has had a particularly negative effect on the poor.
And this gets me to the point I always come back to when thinking about the abortion debate. All those who support making abortion illegal are really supporting making abortion illegal for poor women. Rich women, even if abortion were illegal, will have access to abortions. They'll fly to where they are legal. They'll pay the high price of expensive doctors. And poor women will be the ones effected by the restriction; they will suffer birthing babies conceived from rape, or conceived by teenagers without access to contraceptives, or conceived unwanted and unplanned.
I remember before 1973 when abortion was illegal. I knew fellow college students who flew to New York or had the inside information on where to go if you needed an abortion. And I also knew poorer women who had "connections" to the seamier side of the community where back-street butchers offered to get rid of unwanted pregnancies.
As long as there are unwanted pregnancies, there will be abortions. Because women will rather get rid of their unwanted pregnancies than face the prospect of birth and adoption. We can hope for change, we can work on adjusting attitudes about this, but we must also acknowledge the situation as it presently is.
Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions. It will only return us to a time when there were MORE abortions, and when the effect on poor women was even greater, when illegal backstreet abortionists maimed and killed the women getting the abortions as well as the unborn babies.
In the summer of 2006, Senator Hilary Clinton said that Americans should
"unite around a common goal of reducing the amount of abortions, not by making them illegal as many are attempting to do or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions…."
I agree with this.
In my opinion, the government does not need to decide the moral issue for women on whether abortion is right or not. We're perfectly capable of making that decision ourselves. We each have our own faith to guide us.
The government needs only to ensure that information about reproduction is available, that contraception and family planning options exist, that health care and services are affordable and safe. And then women can make moral decisions and take responsibility for their reproductive choices.
jmho.
On April 18, 2008, Douglas W. Kmiec was denied Communion at a Catholic Mass in Westlake, California. Ironically, Kmiec had been invited by a Catholic business group to give a dinner address on the Bishop’s teaching of “Faithful Citizenship.” Kmiec had served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But now, he found himself rejected by his faith—simply for endorsing the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama. In a new book just released by Overlook, Can a Catholic Support Him?, Kmiec offers us a thoughtful explanation of his rationale. He addresses the difficult questions at the core of his decision: Can a Catholic support a Pro-Choice candidate? Can there be a reverence for life that embraces a larger set of values? How does a Catholic citizen balance his obligations to the Church and to community? In asking these questions, he challenges those whose partisan interests are provoking a false rift between the Catholic Church and the Democratic party. This inquiry could hardly be more timely. Catholics have been on the side of the top vote-getter in the last nine presidential elections, and make up roughly one fourth of the electorate. This provocative book—at once a legal and religious treatise and a sincere and personal journey of faith—will be an irreplaceable contribution to the conversation, in 2008 and beyond.
Yes, that's correct. A super-wonky hunk of lamb on a hunk of 2 x 4. I may just turn slightly edgy yet!
-Claire
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2122070406795922576-2350613643022278471?l=thinkaboutwriting.blogsp
</p>
<div class="post-comments">
2 Comments on <em>My 2010 Wish List</em>, last added: 12/29/2009</div> <!-- end post-comments -->
<a class = "displaycomment" href="javascript:toggleLayer( "View comments for this post"){kind=small}
Display Comments
I agree, abortion used for birth control in my opinion is a disgrace. It is a different world now than it was in the 1940s and 50s. Women have so many more options to provide for their unborn child today than they did years ago.
With that said,I would never want to see them go back to back-alley abortion again. There has to be more education and a better understanding of human life. It's not easy for women to face abortion, and it leaves them with life time emotional scars. It's a very controversial subject, and in my opinion, There is always a yin and a yang. Nothing is absolute black and white. Grey area infiltrates our lives in so many intricate ways. We can only pray for the unborn, and hope that women make the right decision. For me personally, it would be to choose life.
Susan
I understand your point of view,but if we say murder is wrong but it is okay to murder an unborn child why would anyone think it is not a good choice?
Abortion is being used to get rid of an inconvenient situation, in my opinion, when the woman had a choice to use birth control or abstain from having sex to prevent a pregnancy. Once you have made that choice you should do the humane thing and deliver the child alive and healthy.
Also, I have heard that abortion clinics do not tell women that there will be pain, both emotional and physical. They also do not tell women that the fetus feels pain and fights against being aborted. (I heard this information from someone who worked for years in an abortion clinic and is now fighting against abortions.) Clinics are under no obligation to tell women the truth and they are making money for performing abortions so why would they tell?
Woman don't have to choose back alley abortions, they can face the choices they have already made. A fetus is a living human being that has no choice at all.