They are dividing their votes fairly evenly three ways tonight between John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. If I were Keith Olbermann, I might try to figure out who is worse, worser, and worst person in the race for reproductive rights. But it's such a toss-up that I'll pass on awarding that prize, so coveted by the fundamentalist hard right. . All three would overturn Roe v Wade faster than you can say "Supreme Court". But that's just the beginning of the damage each would do to women's most fundamental human rights to make their own childbearing decisions--including access to birth control--without government interference.

When I write that last phrase about government interference, I think about the late Senator Barry Goldwater--known as Mr. Conservative--would turn over in his grave. His wife Peggy was a founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona and Barry was a staunch supporter of reproductive rights precisely because he believed such personal matters weren't the government's business. And he once said good Christians ought to kick Moral Majority founder Rev. Jerry Falwell in the ass. Republicans of Goldwater's stripe are rare as hen's teeth these days, thanks to an unholy alliance between the Republican party and the fundamentalists that was nurtured over a generation at the grassroots precinct level where control of the party mechanism begins. That's why those who think the fundamentalist right is losing steam need to think again.

Yes, everyone wants to fall in love with a candidate. But in the end, this is a group that does what all citizens in a democracy should do: the unromantic work of sustained participating in the political process. And if history is a predictor, they are likely to continue to do so in a much more disciplined way than the Democratic constituencies tend to do. So watch out. If you care about reproductive justice, be very afraid of any of these candidates. Batten down the hatches and be prepared to work very hard between now and November. Because when it comes to advancing the fundamentalist right’s goals, Tina Turner was right: love has very little to do with it.

Not the Roe in Roe v Wade, but the nameless, faceless Roe that all women became after the U. S. Supreme Court's latest and largest rollback of Roe v Wade, Gonzales v Carhart . One has only to contrast Justice Anthony Kennedy's 2007 majority opinion dismissing women's brains, consciences, and even their health, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in which she said protecting reproductive rights isn't about "some vague or generalized notion of privacy" but of "a woman's autonomy to decide for herself her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature," to see that the abortion issue is at its core about women and women's place in the world.

So on the 35th anniversary of a decision that should have guaranteed women's human rights to make their own childbearing decisions without a bazillion legislators and a bunch of fundamentalist preachers weighing in, I and all women are rapidly becoming nameless and faceless Roes, the pseudonymous name used to represent a whole class of people in intrusive and volatile cases. In this case, clearly second class.

I can't talk about Roe without mentioning the precedent from which it flowed: Griswold v Connecticut .

Griswold legalized birth control in 1965 based on the right to privacy--"the right to be left alone"--on matters as personal and private as sex and family formation.

It's clear as a bell that privacy alone, though valuable, isn't strong enough to guarantee reproductive justice in the future. It's absurd to continue fighting an incrementally losing battle for Roe in its current state.

According to Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine, Justice Ginsburg is "a fervent believer in the [Constitution's 14th amendment] equal protection" as the basis for gender equality, including reproductive rights. "Since pregnancy happens only to women, she believes it's simply discrimination against women to ban a medical procedure a woman wants." This would be a much more durable legal framework and a dramatically different approach for the next president, Congress, and the future Supreme Court.

I am Roe.

I'm aware that Roe's plaintiff Norma McCorvey, who never had the abortion and ended up giving the child up for adoption, was "born again" 23 years later (after working for many years at women's clinics where abortions were performed and living, then rejecting, her life as a lesbian) and now opposes abortion. But for every Norma, I've known dozens of women who were against abortion until faced with an unintended or dangerous pregnancy. I have even seen women picket against abortion one day and come into the same clinic the next day seeking abortion for themselves or their daughters because "my situation is different".

Yes, it is different for each woman, a difference that defines her life and her future profoundly, and the future of the children she already has or wants to have too. That's exactly why women must have both the freedom and the responsibility to make their own childbearing decisions.

Toobin warns, "One factor and one factor alone will determine the future of the Supreme Court: the outcome of the presidential elections."

The elections will determine the future for all of us Roes. That's why a mortally wounded Roe v Wade's 35th anniversary requires the candidates to answer my questions in full. Facile answers to "Are you pro-choice or anti-choice?" and "Do you support the Roe v Wade decision?" or "Do you believe the Constitution includes a right to privacy?" don't suffice any more.

I am Roe and I have these questions for presidential candidates:

1. Do you agree that reproductive rights are human rights? (If your answer is "no", do not pass go, do not collect my paltry campaign contribution, and no two-stepping explanation will bail you out.)

2. If your answer is "yes", tell me what you'll do to lead America to secure a more durable policy and legal basis for reproductive self-determination. Specifically:

a) Will you urge Congress to pass, so you can sign, the Freedom of Choice Act: guaranteeing women the right to decide for themselves whether to have a child or not?

b) Will you urge Congress to pass, so you can sign, the Prevention First Act to provide greater access to family planning services that prevent unintended pregnancies and abortion, and the Responsible Education About Life Act to end unhealthy abstinence-only sex education and support medically accurate, comprehensive sex education?

c) Will you urge Congress to overturn the Global Gag Rule, that strips funding for family planning overseas from any organization that provides or even speaks about abortion, by passing the Global Democracy Protection Act?

d) Will you work to make abortion not just safe, legal, and rare, but also accessible? Will your health plan, including Medicaid if it's still around, cover abortion as part of women's health care?

e) Will you articulate the public health, legal, and moral imperative for these measures in your campaign speeches and State-of-the-Union addresses?

f) Will you bring the Federal judiciary into balance by appointing judges who will uphold reproductive rights as human and civil rights under which women are entitled to equal protection?

While I'm at it, I'll ask similar questions of candidates for Congress and state offices.

If you'll ask the questions too, insist upon full answers, and vote accordingly, I promise you that whether Roe has 35 more anniversaries or not, our daughters and granddaughters will have a chance to grow up with the blessings of liberty, equality, and justice.

The Democratic candidates answer some of Gloria's questions here.  This article originally appeard on The Huffington Post.

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.

Jane was a young housewife with three preschool children in a southern Arizona ranching community in pre-pill 1958. The thought of caring for four children on a budget that strained hard to feed three had stressed her relationship with her husband almost to the breaking point. As much as she loved her children, Jane cried for days and thought she would either go insane or kill herself if she had to have another child.

Three women friends who had made the journey previously accompanied Jane across the border to Nogales, Mexico, where abortions were illegal, as they were then in Arizona and every other state in the U.S, While the women had heard of doctors in Phoenix who would terminate pregnancies for $1,000 or more, Jane couldn't begin to afford that. So for the U. S. equivalent of $100, Jane had an abortion. She bled profusely and was treated for infection after she returned -- but she regained her emotional balance, and was able to hold the family together. She later volunteered for the local NARAL affiliate determined that American women should not suffer the humiliation, indignities, and sheer terror she experienced.

Jane is a composite of women who have told me their stories over the years.

Sarah is Sarah Weddington, a Methodist minister's daughter who at age 26 became the youngest woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her winning case was the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the U.S and has since saved the lives, health, and dignity of millions of women. She later served in the Texas legislature and the Carter administration; she remains a leading advocate for women.

Since Roe, and until very recently, Mexican women of means have routinely traveled to the U.S. for safe, legal abortions, much as Sarah and Jane traveled to Mexico in a previous generation for illegal ones.

A seismic shift occurred last April when Mexico City decriminalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

While they wait for what they predict will be a favorable ruling by the Federal Supreme Court, reproductive rights activists are consolidating their gains by training medical and social workers in counseling women respectfully about all their pregnancy options. According to Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes, executive director of GIRE, Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Eligida/Information Group on Reproductive Choice, they are also working to ensure that public hospitals meet the law's requirements to provide abortion services free of charge as part of routine healthcare, and that the law's provisions for universal access to birth control methods and sexuality education to prevent unintended pregnancy from occurring in the first place are fully in force.

Abortion remains illegal in most of Mexico, except for cases of rape, incest, and in some states certain other reasons. Activists like Sanchez Fuentes are working to change that, heartened by public support in Mexico City, where the slogan is "Women decide, society respects, and the state guarantees."

Abortion, legal or not, exists in all societies because women the world over want a few simple things: to make a decent life for the children they have -- in the U.S., over 60 percent are mothers with one or more children when they choose abortion --and the right to their own lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And because unintended pregnancies inevitably occur for a variety of reasons.

The difference is that when abortion is clandestine, women die or suffer debilitating illness such as infection or infertility. And in a profound sense, the psychological stigma of going to the back alley instead of the front door of a medical facility is harder to bear than the risk of infection, for it signals complete disregard for women's moral capacity to think and make responsible decisions.

Will women's rights activists in Mexico learn the lessons from U.S. that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" as Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned, so that the organized backlash against reproductive self-determination for women does not bring political setbacks like those in the U.S.?

Will we in the U.S. learn the lessons from Mexico, and make sure women have not just legal affirmation of the human right to make their own childbearing decisions, but also access to preventive services that reduce the need for abortion and full access to abortion services regardless of ability to pay? Or will we reach a point that American women must resort once more to crossing the border to Mexico for essential health care and respect they can't get at home?

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

September 14 is the birthday of Margaret Sanger, founder of the U.S. birth control movement. She was born Margaret Higgins in Corning, New York, in 1879, though ever vain, she would later alter the family Bible to appear three years younger. The sixth child of eleven living siblings, her earliest childhood memories were of crying beside her mother's bed as after she almost died following a difficult childbirth.

Sanger's mother, Anne Higgins, did die, worn out from those too frequent pregnancies and births, at age 50. These experiences formed the sensibilities that propelled Margaret Sanger to advocate for birth control. She dedicated her first book on the fundamental rights of women to control their fertility to her mother. The quotation above and those that follow reveal her clear worldview about women and a laser-like focus on the work she believed to be the most essential to women's health, wellbeing, and rightful place in the world:

She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

Perhaps the best-known and most quoted of Sanger's statements is this one that cuts to the core of why reproductive self determination is simple justice for woman, and that without the freedom to make her own childbearing decisions, no other freedoms have meaning:

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

But her belief in the value of birth control went beyond feminism and women's freedom. Too often, the right to sexual pleasure is pushed aside in the debates over birth control access today. Margaret took this subject on in the same frank way she took on other issues, and even included guidance about achieving orgasm in some of her writings. She spent much of her life raising money and supporting the research that led to the birth control pill, believing that a reliable method that could separate intercourse from the mechanics of birth control could not only dramatically reduce unintended pregnancies but also increase a couple's sexual pleasure.

A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place.

When she started her quest at the dawn of the twentieth century, birth control was illegal and such methods as existed were rudimentary at best. Indeed, the term "birth control" hadn't even been created. "Family limitation" was the term of art at the time, and "reproductive health" wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye. Sanger had neither funds nor powerful supporters nor the force of public opinion behind her when she took her first bold steps. But she had passion for her mission, a vision of how she would bring birth control to women through a network of clinics that ultimately became Planned Parenthood. She had a sharp sense of how to use controversy and the media to stir up support for her cause.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

Sanger's words which have most influenced my approach to life and my work for women's reproductive rights, health, and justice are simply these:

Life has taught me: we must put our convictions into action.

I suspect that were she still alive, it would please her greatly to know that so many people continue to put our convictions into action for the cause she began. But she would be appalled to see the many challenges that still exist to keep women from having universal and affordable access to birth control. Ellen Chesler's biography of Sanger ends with her granddaughter and namesake, Margaret Sanger Marston, asking her grandmother how she wanted to be remembered. Margaret Sanger's response was that "she hoped she would be remembered for helping women, because women are the strength of the future. They take care of culture and tradition and preserve what is good."

And that's how we should remember her today. Thanks to Sanger, so many women can now joyously celebrate their freely chosen "birth days."