Posts Tagged ‘roe v. wade’
“Omaba Caint” Post Sure Could Get Blog Buzz Going
Seems like my last post, “Obama Caint Choose Kaine”, riled some folks up.
Erin Kotecki Vest, who blogs at BlogHer and Queen of Spain, got on my case with several arguments worthy of response. I have great respect for Erin, and am pleased for this excuse to congratulate her in public on becoming BlogHer’s Producer of Special Projects (high five here!).
However, I learned from hard knocks on the political frontlines that her argument on behalf of Gov. Kaine is self-defeating. Sadly, it also demonstrates how we can make it so incredibly hard to hold politicians’ feet to the fire about reproductive rights, health, and justice, and how women are often entirely too well behaved to make history turn out the way we want it.
True, the issues of birth control, sex education, reproductive rights, and abortion have been so polarized by the media’s false balance (someone else used that phrase on HuffPo last week, but I made it up when I wrote The War on Choice) that both the facts and the framing get skewed in public discourse. That’s frustrating to be sure. But, the deal is, whoever defines the terms of the debate is probably going to win it. And you can’t ever win at all if you don’t stay in the game.
If you haven’t already, please read “Obama Caint Chose Kaine” for my key points about Obama’s veep pick, which I won’t reiterate here. Here’s an excerpt of Erin’s reaction:
We could go through and talk about Kaine’s repeated his position supporting Roe and what he’s done as Governor…however, let’s just put all that aside too.
Let’s deal with the realities of this country. The reality of government. The reality of America in 2008.
Read MoreA DOCTOR WHO WAS THERE DESCRIBES ABORTION PRE-ROE
Repairing the Damage, Before Roe by Waldo Fielding M.D., in today’s New York Times is a must read and must share. Fielding is 80; his generation of doctors knows the real stories about the injustices of illegal abortion. An excerpt:
With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside. When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe “bad old days.” Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.
I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals. There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion…
Now it’s up to the generation now present to make the coat hanger (photos of which accompnied the article) a symbol of women’s empowerment rather than victimization.
Read MoreRoe’s Midlife Crisis
Today, January 22, 2008, marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade. If you’re reading my blog, you almost certainly know that’s the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion based on the right to privacy in matters as personal as childbearing.
We’ve kept Roe alive despite a constant tack backward by courts, state laws, and a federal abortion ban that’s been upheld by the Supremes. Meanwhile, in pop culture–movies like Juno and Knocked Up for example–abortion has become increasingly cast, if at all, as some clandestine act that nice people would never engage in.
If this trend continues, then life will imitate art and abortion will become clandestine again.
Read MoreU.S.-Mexico Border Crossings Go Both ways
Mention the U.S.-Mexico border and you set off political hot buttons. Everyone knows the two countries share complex historical, economic, and cultural relationships. But one relationship is seldom acknowledged: the movement of women across the border in both directions to obtain abortions over the years.
Sarah was a 22-year-old law school student at the University of Texas when she became pregnant in 1964. Her future husband was planning to attend law school after she graduated and got a job. They agreed they didn’t want to have a child before marriage and felt they both deserved the chance to finish school. Together, they went to Piedras Negras across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, where she had an illegal, but thankfully safe, abortion.
Read MorePartial Truth Decision
“[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations goldmine…The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it.”
So said Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.
Today’s U.S. Supreme Court’s Gonzales v Carhart decision upholding the federal abortion ban is based that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.
Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the Court’s majority, in addition to using the term “partial birth abortion”, also used the term “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors”, or if ob/gyns call them “ob/gyns”? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to “tonsillectomy doctor” or “hysterectomy doctor”? Of course not. But those who want to take away a woman’s human right to make her own childbearing decisions entirely have for so long used the term “abortion doctor” as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to use their language.
Read MoreSouth Dakota Law New Chapter in Story of Childbearing Rights
The biggest news about the sweeping new South Dakota law that will ban all abortions except to save the woman’s life—no exceptions to preserve her health or for rape or incest–is that it is not such big news, It is in fact a news story that has been repeated over and over for more than a generation. But this time the story might well be headed for a disastrously different ending.
The South Dakota abortion ban, which passed the state legislature Feb.22 and was signed by Governor Mike Rounds (R), will join over a dozen state bans already on the books. It’s a head-on challenge to Roe v Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Most of the outright abortion bans predate Roe, or passed soon after it. None can be enforced now because Roe is federal precedent that applies to all states.
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