The defeat of state anti-abortion
ballot measures marks the buckling of an underlying girder of the anti-abortion
movement. For years, anti-abortion adherents have insisted that
the U.S. Supreme Court wrongly took the matter of abortion out of the
hands of the voters in 1973 with the decision in Roe v. Wade
and, willy-nilly, imposed the right to choose on an unwilling public.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, a former vice-president of Feminists for Life and a well-known anti-abortion writer and speaker, lays out this view in the 2007 documentary, Beyond the Politics of Life & Choice: A New Conversation About Abortion.
Mathewes-Green says:
The problem with Roe v. Wade was that the people had no chance to vote. Nine men in black robes decided what the law of the land was going to be. Americans had no opportunity to speak on this and to say how they felt about abortion, what they thought the laws ought to be. We've never had a chance to say what our convictions are.
In 2008, the people did have
an opportunity to speak, and their convictions aren't with Mathewes-Green.
The conviction of the voters is the that abortion should be available
and legal. They said that in Colorado, where a state ballot measure
could have resulted in banning all abortion, and in South Dakota, where
a ballot measure would have criminalized most abortions.
South Dakota rejected an abortion
ban this November by a double-digit spread with 55 percent against it
to 44 percent in favor. This is a state that tossed its electoral
college votes to Republican John McCain. In 2006, the South Dakota
voters spoke their convictions in almost exactly the same way and with
the same voting margin when confronted with a more restrictive ban.
Adding limited exceptions in 2008 did nothing to change their views.
In fact, the 2008 ballot measure would have made abortion about as available
in South Dakota as it was in Texas when its law was challenged in
Roe, and the voters in South Dakota still said no.
In Colorado, where I traveled
in the fall with performances of the play Words of Choice, voters
could hear Kristi Burton, spokeswoman for the antiabortion "personhood"
amendment, argue her case on a video opinion-editorial. Burton said, enthusiastically,
that the ballot amendment "lets us tell our elected officials and
judges who we think a person is ... We want to have a voice on it and
it's time to give the people of Colorado a voice."
The voice of the people of Colorado came though loud and clear. By a margin of three to one, they shouted: they don't agree with Burton and they don't want to turn back the clock. The vote -- 73 percent against the measure to 27 percent for it -- is not so different from the percentages of men in black robes on the Supreme Court who tossed out the Texas law by a vote of 7 to 2 in Roe.
But don't count on anti-abortion activists to admit the crash of their long-parroted sentiment. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the perfect term for this type of linguistic and intellectual bob-and-weave in 2007. She described another prolife myth -- that women who have abortions come to regret them -- as "an antiabortion shibboleth" for which there is "no reliable evidence." In fact, the word "shibboleth," rooted in Hebrew, means a saying used by "adherents" that is "empty of real meaning."
A "shibbolet watch" might be in order to keep the "Roe usurped the will of the people" argument from rearing again. Some anti-abortion forces seem intent on ignoring the "real meaning" of the election. Colorado anti-abortion adherents declared immediately that they will continue to push their losing personhood amendment in other states. They will do so, they said, "regardless of polls or winning or losing elections." So much for the "voice" of the voters. ]]>While the tribute to Ginsburg especially reflected on her packed career as a lawyer from 1969 to 1980 in seeking legal redress for sex discrimination, Ginsburg also answered audience questions, including ones on the health of Roe v. Wade today. Below are her informal comments about the state of reproductive freedom.
To one question about the prospects
and future of Roe v. Wade, Justice Ginsburg responded:
"People tend to think
that Roe v Wade has to be preserved at all costs. What has to
be preserved is the right of a woman to have access to the means to
control her own reproductive capacity.
"And it has to be much more than the bare right of a woman of means to obtain an abortion .... Our government has a policy that there is no Medicaid reimbursement for abortion, that there is for childbirth. I think that the concentration really should be at the legislative level, in the states, and in Congress, assuming the composition of Congress will continue to change, as it has recently.
"But I would never put my
faith in one single Supreme Court decision.
"The work really has to start
at the local level. I remember once, in New York, trying to find
how hard it was for a poor woman to get an IUD. And it was terribly
hard. That's what we should be concerned about."
To a second questioner who asked whether lawyers should work to recast the legal basis of reproductive freedom from the right to privacy set out in Roe to one based on the thirteenth amendment against slavery or the fourteenth amendment, Justice Ginsburg said:
"I think lawyers have
argued that -- in the Casey case, for example. It's not privacy,
in the sense that ‘This something I want to do and hide from everybody,
and, seal myself in a cocoon.' It's autonomy (which) is the
idea; it's a woman's right to choose.
"And I have criticized the
Court's decision in Roe v. Wade -- not, of course, for the result.
But that decision is heavily oriented to doctors. It's the doctor's
choice as much as the woman's that the government shouldn't regulate
what doctors decide is best for the patient.
"But I think the notion of
a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, that has come
more and more into the ... more recent cases.
"Of course, the most recent case is a flip-flop. The court had (held) that Nebraska's so-called 'partial birth' law ... was unconstitutional because it didn't preserve -- have a reservation for -- a woman's health. Then Congress passed a law to the same effect, and the Court, 5-4, upheld that federal law.
"What was the difference? One person. Justice (Sandra Day) O'Connor was no longer on the Court.
"But I think the notion (is) that it isn't just some private act; it is a woman's right to control ... her own life." ]]>I remember that moment as Words of Choice releases a DVD of our theatrical performance. We're launching the Words of Choice DVD in New York on October 19. As the election season goes into full swing, I hope that Words of Choice on DVD will raise the banner of reproductive justice and open new conversations about what freedom means to the real lives of women -- and men -- across the nation.
Since Words of Choice is neither a lecture nor a political speech, I've found that people are able to hear and respond in ways that they might not otherwise. The play is a collection of stories -- funny, poignant and serious -- by a dozen writers and covering a panorama of experiences with contraception, abortion, pregnancy, the Religious Right and activism. In one selection, two women comically list fourteen years of sin at confession. In another, a pregnant teen tries to remember the phone number of a one-night stand. A selection by Angela Bonavoglia from "The Choices We Made" describes a father's feelings after his daughter is raped. Emily Lyons relates the dozens of surgeries she needed after she was bombed at a clinic where she worked in Alabama and explains why she continues to speak out for women's right to make their own reproductive decisions. (Angela and Emily will join in us in a post-show discussion on October 19.)
In Kansas, where we filmed Words of Choice, and in the approximately 20 states and 45 cities we've visited, Words of Choice has encountered incredible pro-choice activists. The student organizer from the NOW chapter at Kansas State University packed an auditorium and scored a favorable editorial in the ultra-conservative student newspaper. The KSU Collegian wrote: "While the play ‘Words of Choice' does promote a decidedly pro-choice message, the forum after the play presents a golden opportunity for proactive dialogue about one of the most divisive issues in our nation."
But local activists often toil with rare affirmation and much antagonism. At one Kansas college where we performed, someone anonymously posted a grainy fetus picture on the door of the auditorium. The college followed up with no investigation or inquiry, to be sure -- this is accepted as normal behavior. In Wichita, activists would wake up in the morning to find their cars defaced and damaged; police were indifferent. Much of women's real experience is censored, whether in sex ed or in Hollywood movies like "Knocked Up" or the new documentary "Lake of Fire."
Other people are sadly misinformed. A Kansas campus minister, supposedly pro-choice, said in a post-show discussion that he was surprised to hear the story of a woman with a severe fetal anomaly who needed an intact d & e abortion ("partial-birth abortion") and that he had never thought about a woman who might need this healthcare.
As the director of communications of a national pro-choice organization, I sat through many "messaging" meetings. We saw polls and reviewed phrases tested by high-powered consultants. But so many times, I had the sense that we were talking to people sitting in rarefied air at the top of the pyramid and not tending to those struggling -- or strolling -- on the glade. Stories, opportunities to engage people, chances for people to hear pro-freedom voices and consider for themselves where they fit, were missing.
At the time we were in Kansas, then-Attorney General Phill Kline was conducting a vicious assault on the privacy in healthcare, asserting that any teen sexual activity constituted rape and demanding the records of women from clinics. As a teenager in Ohio, I remember going to the family doctor, worried that I might be pregnant. He did some tests, and to my relief, said I wasn't pregnant. I paid, using money I earned waitressing. After I left, the doctor called my parents -- something neither safe nor comfortable for me; the sense of betrayal never left. Spurred on by my own experiences with breaches of medical privacy, I thought people in Kansas should hear what was happening in their state, even though it got little local coverage. A state legislator thanked me, but said that she could never speak out publicly.
One woman emailed me later. "Words of Choice was truly a blessing," she said. "It motivated me to keep organizing in my community, made me realize that there are people in other parts of the country who haven't forgotten that there are grassroots organizers in the Midwest."
For these young women, and for all of the organizers trying to make a difference in their communities, the Words of Choice DVD is a tool. Producer Linda ("Sam") Haskins of TakeTen Productions added photography from Dorothy Fadiman, Lisa Link, Bettye Lane and Women's eNews. Interviews of pro-choice activists are included. Suzanne Grossman, a multi-talented activist with a master's in women's and gender studies, created a series of discussion exercises.
Since women, young and mature, will continue to need reproductive health care no matter who is in office, we must find more ways to speak to them. We know that what happens in Kansas and South Dakota and Ohio matters to the real lives of women and to the future of reproductive justice and liberty.
Artistic investigations of reproductive rights open new doors, too rarely explored in the battle over policy. We need to reach for the treetops, but also to water the grass and roots. To that end, more creativity is in demand.
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