If there is one thing that pro-lifers are good at, it is creating posters intended to shock and blame. The most disturbing and extreme pro-life poster I have ever seen is, by far, the "Malachi" poster (circa 1993), which shows a blown up photograph of a supposedly aborted fetus. Lately, the pro-lifers have been less graphically disturbing but just as relentless, displaying phrases like "Abortion is Murder". Last weekend posters like these were on exhibit at a pro-life rally less than one mile from my school. Over 50 people came out to stand with National Life Chain Sunday, a project of a Christian pro-life ministry based 45 miles north of Sacramento, CA called Please Let Me Live. These "life chains" are held in numerous cities across the U.S. on the first Sunday of every October (for a list of cities that participated, click here).
Rewire has featured several guest bloggers writing about Prop. 85. If passed, this ballot initiative would prohibit abortions for California teens until 48 hours after their parents have been notified.
While watching Match Point on DVD the other night, I was dismayed to encounter one of my least favorite movie cop-outs of all time: a conversation about abortion where the characters refuse to say the word abortion. Lame, lame, lame.
Dr. Connie Mitchell is a nationally recognized expert on the health care of victims of violence and abuse. She serves on the AMA National Advisory Council on Violence and Abuse and is a member of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. This is another in a series of posts looking at the ballot initiative in California.
Last week, I read an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee from a doctor who supports parental notification legislation. In his op-ed, Dr. John Gisla argued that Proposition 85 is "simple, common sense legislation." I completely disagree. Prop. 85 is neither simple nor common sense, nor is it necessary. Let's look at the facts.
In North Carolina, Rep. Brad Miller’s (D-13) record of funding for health studies that could prevent the spread of AIDS, and foster better understanding of the sexual health of an aging population and marginalized communities are being portrayed as “paying for sex” by opponent Vernon Robinson (aka “Black Jesse Helms”). The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Political Fact Check.orgrefers to the ad as “sneering” and says its factual accuracy is “wanting” and “misleading on several counts.” In this ad we see how sexual and reproductive health issues are used to titillate and grab attention, all the while stigmatizing and degrading people and studies that are in the interest of public health by distorting their reality, all for political gain, power and control.
[img_assist|nid=892|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=97|height=150]Hats off to Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, who released a truly amazing Catholic voter guide called Voting for the Common Good last week, in anticipation of the upcoming congressional elections. The guide outlines 18 "issues important to Catholics," mentioning abortion side by side with poverty, human rights, the environment, the death penalty, minimum wage, and workers' rights - among other urgent social justice issues du jour. I may not agree with the guide's take on every single issue, but I like the way its authors think.
In taking such a balanced, thoughtful, and morally consistent approach, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good subtly calls out the deafeningly black and white directives on voting one's religious values that are all the rage among hard-line right-wing organizations like the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) these days.
The famous Chinese general, Sun Tzu, in his infamous military treatise, "The Art of War," wrote: "All warfare is based on deception." Common sense tells us, however, that for a deception to prove effective, the lie must ring true. That is where the enemies of reproductive choice fail in the newest stratagem in their war: the attack on contraception.
[img_assist|nid=598|title=Special Series|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=67]A couple of weeks ago, anti-choice activists gathered in Chicago for a conference entitled, "Contraception Is Not the Answer." You may have read about it in the Chicago Tribune, or in blogs like this one. The organizer of this attack on contraception was none other than Joe Scheidler and his Pro-Life Action League, the man who vowed to stop abortion "by any means necessary" and the group he called the "pro-life mafia" - the same group that proclaimed a "year of pain and fear" in the 1980s during a rash of violent attacks on abortion providers and clinics. Now it seems that our friend Joe has decided that contraception is the cause of most, if not all, of society's problems.
Gloria Feldt is the author of "The War on Choice," keynote speaker, and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She is currently working on a book with Kathleen Turner called "Take the Lead, Lady!"
Part one of a small series in honor of the Oct. 16 anniversary of the first American birth control clinic, with the purpose of exploring why birth control is still at stake today and what we must do to secure the right and access to it:
I'm not much for remembering dates. Birthdays and anniversaries tend to escape me, even my own. Maybe especially my own--some people call that denial.
But I have been thinking about the upcoming 90th anniversary of the first American birth control movement on Oct. 16. And I've been wondering what Margaret Sanger would think if she could spend a day with me checking out the state of the movement that dates its beginning with the opening day of that clinic on Amboy Street near Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn.
Frances Kissling is President of Catholics for a Free Choice. This article appears in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of Conscience and also on Salon.com.
If abortion is a morally neutral act and does not endanger women's health, why bother to prevent the need for it? After all, the cost of a first-trimester abortion is comparable to the cost of a year's supply of birth control pills-and abortion has fewer complications and less medical risk for women than some of the most effective methods of contraception. This question has plagued advocates of choice since abortion was legalized. It has intensified in the face of antiabortion moralism about sex and responsibility, in the continued stigmatization of women who have abortions and in the increasingly expressed mantra that "there are simply too many abortions in the U.S." Frustration has led some advocates of legal abortion to dig in their heels and insist that any talk about preventing abortions denigrates women as moral decision-makers, misunderstands the reasons women have abortions, retreats from principled support for the right of women to choose abortion without government interference and tacitly lends credence to the contention that abortion is almost always morally wrong.
