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Life and Liberty
for Women
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| Shortcomings of the Current
Abortion Rights Movement |
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| Over the last ten years I have become
increasingly aware that the current abortion rights
organizations have some major shortcomings which
I believe left women vulnerable to the messages,
the lies, and distortions of the anti-abortion movement. |
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| The religious right has been incredibly
successful at raising millions upon millions of
dollars from their dedicated supporters. They have
also been incredibly skillful at molding the emotionally
charged, warm fuzzy messages and strategies that
have been responsible for changing not only the
landscape and premise of the abortion debate, but
also boxing the abortion rights movement into a
defensive stance. Playing defense has nearly cost
the abortion rights movement Roe vs. Wade. They
barely succeeded at staving off a direct hit on
Roe, beginning in the 80's with anti-abortion Presidents
and continuing into the 90's with an increasingly
anti-abortion |
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| Congress and many anti-abortion state
legislatures. Marlene Gerber Fried, From Abortion
to Reproductive Freedom, 1990 articulated it this
way, "In the aftermath of Webster, fear of further
losses is causing some mainstream pro-choice groups
to continue the defensive posture that has characterized
the pro-choice movement since Roe vs. Wade. They
argue that if we fail to compromise, we will lose
everything. The political implications of this stance
are already being felt." |
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| The abortion rights movement, has
been working with a limited supply of money, and
an ever shrinking, frightened, discouraged, and
complacent base of supporters. They were forced
to fight tough defensive battles to stave off legislative
attacks both in Congress and at the state level,
all with limited success. They were forced to fight
state ballot measures and work feverishly to increase
their influence in state electoral politics. |
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The current abortion rights
movement has
employed strategies that have serious flaws.
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| The only saving grace? Persistent,
and somewhat successful, legal challenges to anti-abortion
laws, the Supreme Court's current narrow margin
reluctant to over turn Roe vs. Wade because of the
public's fear, albeit shrinking, of ALL abortions
being banned AND a fear of government limiting personal
freedom. These four events, as luck would have it,
has barely, and for now, kept the abortion rights
movement in the ball game. |
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| How did we get to this
point of desperation? |
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| First, Ricki Solinger in her essay
"Poisonous Choice", printed in a book titled "Bad
Mothers", makes this case. The adoption of the word
and actions of "choice" over the word and actions
of "right" in 1973 by abortion rights advocates
in order to win legalization of abortion, has had
far reaching consequences. |
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| Eventually, Solinger notes, the word
"choice" became associated "with bad women making
bad choices." |
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| In her essay, Solinger deals with
the question of "Who is a mother? Who decides, and
using what criteria?" Solinger's purpose in the
essay was to "consider the consequences for millions
of women in the United States of the brief flicker,
and then the withering away, of 'rights' claims
in the pregnancy/motherhood arena, and the substitution
of 'choice' as the governing principle - the principle
that girls and women must count on in order to own
their own bodies and their destinies. I will," she
says, "argue that the concept of 'choice' endangers
many women in this country. And the danger is broad
and deep, going well beyond the issue of abortion."
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the abortion rights movement
broadened their base at the price of narrowing
their agenda.(and) they never bargained for the latter consequence.
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| Solinger's piece is insightful and
she reminds us of what we can never escape, the
connection between motherhood, choice, and class
privilege. Solinger says, "As with slave women,
poor Catholic urban women, and white unwed mothers
in the past, many contemporary women are cast as
lacking the right to claim motherhood status or
to escape sanctions for having made the claim. But
'choice' has a new trenchant relevancy for public
policy, as it provides the anti-welfare constituency
with a justification for ending benefits and provides
anti-abortion proponents with justification for
tightening access to abortion. After a quarter of
a century, it is clear that 'choice', a term that
many people continue to use as if it is interchangeable
with 'rights', operates in a context quite alienated
from women's rights." |
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| Second, I am deeply concerned about
a strategy that William Saleten, writing in 1998
in Abortion Wars, edited by Ricki Solinger, spoke
of. (Recommended reading "Bearing Right
- How Conservatives Won the Abortion War" by
William Saletan, 2003) It's a strategy that
was conceived of in the early 80's by a few abortion
rights strategists who worked to develop what Saleten
calls an aggressive conservative anti-government
message rather than women's rights message in order
to win the votes of independents and |
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| moderate republicans. And while it
did indeed have the intended consequence of broadening
the base of "pro-choice" voters, it also had a devastating
unintended consequence. In Abortion Wars, Saleten
said, "There is an old maxim in politics that to
broaden your base of support, you must narrow your
agenda. That is what the conservative message strategy
accomplished. It attracted moderate and conservative
voters to the abortion rights movement by muting
the liberal feminist elements of the movement's
message." |
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| Saleten believes that this conservative
strategy was successful for a libertarian backlash
against reviving abortion restrictions, a backlash
that staved off, even "crushing", says Saleten,
a direct hit on Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court
in the Casey decision in 1992. But Saleten notes
that the abortion rights movement lost control of
that conservative message strategy. He says that
the abortion rights movement "broadened their base
at the price of narrowing their agenda.(and) they
never bargained for the latter consequence. And
they did not foresee that by demanding less government
and more sovereignty for families, they were thematically
sanctioning those restrictions." He was speaking
of restrictions like parental notice/consent laws,
24-hour waiting periods, and bans on public funding.
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the unintended consequence
of this conservative message strategy has
placed current abortion rights organizations in a precarious
position
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| Saleten explains in detail, the unintended
consequence of this message strategy. "This is not
to say that the conservative message persuaded swing
voters to support such restrictions. They needed
no such persuasion. What the conservative message
gave these voters," Saleten says, "was a libertarian
rationale that allowed them to identify themselves
as pro-choice without renouncing those restrictions.
They could embrace parental involvement laws as
an extension of their belief in the sovereignty
of families. They could spurn public funding of
abortions as an affront to their belief in smaller
government. A pro-choice message that called for
less government and more family sovereignty was
music to their ears." |
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| "In hindsight," Saleten continues,
"the architects of the conservative message would
like to set these voters straight. They would like
to explain that being pro-family does not mean favoring
parental involvement laws and that being anti-government
does not mean opposing public funding of abortions.
From the moment they expounded their conservative
theme, these architects assumed they were in charge
of its interpretation. They failed to |
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| anticipate how ideas, once launched
into the currents of politics, develop lives of
their own. In the wake of Webster, the conservative
pro-choice message attracted new exponents and new
interpreters. Abortion rights activists lost control
of it." |
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| Clearly, the unintended consequence
of this conservative message strategy has placed
current abortion rights organizations in a precarious
position. They no longer, if they ever did, control
the message strategy, and find themselves torn between
how to keep those voters at the same time they set
them straight. My concern has been a demonstrated
fear by the abortion rights movement to "setting
these voters straight." That fear has also been
responsible, I believe, for the failure of the abortion
rights movement to keep their base of supporters
engaged and energized. That left the swing voters,
and the base of supporters of the abortion rights
movement as well, unprotected and prey for the exploitation
and manipulation by the anti-abortion religious
extremists who salivated at the movement's miscalculation
and fear and who proceeded to take advantage of
it. |
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So, for the abortion rights movement, what
is the unwitting
result of adopting a conservative message strategy
and the language of choice vs. the language of rights?
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| I formed Life and Liberty for Women
to articulate the messages that will set the swing
voters straight and create enthusiasm and engagement,
once again, from our base of abortion rights supporters.
I am confident about exactly how to do both. I have
articulated the messages in letters to the editor
and op-ed pieces and spoken at abortion rights rallies,
in which supporters said they were glad I had the
courage to say what I said the way I said it. The
way I intend to say it through Life and Liberty
for Women. Not surprisingly, my most ardent supporters
have been from our grassroots - those who are the
most steadfast supporters of abortion rights. I
believe it is because they are starved for the forthrightness
of a message of abortion RIGHTS and an EMOTIONAL
delivery that excites them and deepens their conviction
for abortion rights. Marlene Gerber Fried, in From
Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a
Movement, 1990 said, "The activists who are flocking
to the movement are |
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| receptive to a more radical politics
than those being offered by the mainstream organizations." |
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| A very successful anti-abortion exploitation
of this message strategy. Anti-abortion religious
extremists constructed a powerful emotional anti-woman
theme. That theme continues to pit poor "bad women/mothers"
against middle class "good women/mothers". That
theme also uses all that the word "choice" encompasses
in an attempt to prove that women really cannot
be good moral beings capable or trusted with making
good moral decisions and therefore must be reined
in. |
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| The religious right extremists then
cleverly crouched this misogynist and divisive theme
in an emotional message that says, without apology,
that a fetus has a right to life and liberty that
surpasses a woman's right to life and liberty from
conception to birth. No exceptions. Ever. |
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Sadly and dangerously, women are capitulating
to that message and
are now ashamed to own or speak of THEIR RIGHT to life
and liberty.
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| Tanya Melich, a republican woman,
evidenced this nightmare for us in living color
in her book, The Republican War Against Women. In
1981 a religious right wing extremist junior senator
from North Carolina, John East, introduced one of
several "human life" constitutional amendments.
Melich writes, "East's amendment championed the
words of the Republican platform that gave a fertilized
egg more rights than a woman. It didn't simply abrogate
Roe vs. Wade by making abortion a crime; it made
the fetus superior to the woman. The amendment's
strict principle of fetal personhood permitted no
exceptions, not even for the life of the mother.
Abortion would be murder, and a woman who underwent
it would be a sinner. She could be charged with
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| murder either directly or as an accessory
as could all others involved-including doctors and
other health professionals." |
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| Documenting this capitulation is The
Center for Gender Equality established by former
Planned Parenthood executive director, Fay Wattleton.
The Center for Gender Equality found, in a poll
conducted in 1998, that 53% of women say abortion
should be illegal in all circumstances or be allowed
only in the case of rape, incest, or to save a woman's
life. Further and equally as frightening is a comprehensive
survey of 1999 college freshman which found that
only half support efforts to keep abortion legal,
a record-low figure after six years on the decline.
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Is it any wonder that we've
only been able to win
some of the battles but are about to lose the war?
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| Additional evidence from The National
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League's
yearly state by state review for 1999 reveals the
following; |
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| A. "More anti-choice legislation (affecting
not just abortion but also contraception, sex education
and the rights of pregnant women) was introduced
and enacted in the states in 1999 than in any previous
year, with 439 measures introduced and 70 enacted.
This report revels an escalation of anti-choice
legislative activity over the last five years -
the number of anti-choice measures enacted has skyrocketed
almost 300% since 1995." |
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| B. "In the last six years, Congress
voted 120 times on reproductive health issues. Pro-choice
Americans lost all but 22 of these votes." |
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| Add to this the harassment of women
seeking abortion and family planning services by
anti-abortion extremists outside of our clinics,
acts of vandalism to our clinics, and the murder
of our providers and staff. All committed in an
effort to intimidate and scare providers into not
performing abortions and intimidating and scaring
women into not exercising their right to an abortion.
Harassing women is also about shaming women into
denying that they, not |
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| just the fetus, also have a right
to life and liberty. And harassing women destroys
their belief in themselves as good moral beings
making good moral decisions when they decide that
termination of their pregnancy is in the best interest
of both themselves and the fetus they are pregnant
with. |
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| I believe that to reverse the unintended
effects of the abortion rights conservative message
strategy, wipe away the consequence and aftermath
of the language of choice, undo the damage the anti-abortion
messages and scare tactics have done and to ensure
the survival of Roe vs. Wade, both a community and
mass media education program is necessary. I also
believe the message must be a progressive, aggressive
message about RIGHTS. But it isn't a message about
just a woman's right but rather a honest forthright
message about balancing the right to life and liberty
of woman and fetus, so wisely and morally done in
Roe vs. Wade. It is the kind of message that current
abortion rights organizations can't speak, because
they are what I call the "business suit" part of
the movement because they must lobby legislators,
conduct electoral work, and because they are the
deliverers of the conservative message strategy
to the swing voters. But I can speak the message
of RIGHTS, with Life and Liberty
for Women. |
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