March for Women's Lives
By Guest Author
Wednesday. May 26, 11:50 PM
(Josette Akresh) On Sunday, April 25th, 2004, over a million people crowded the Mall in Washington, DC to show their pro-choice stripes. One writer's look into the ever-sensitive issue and the historical occasion.

I used to live right next door to a Planned Parenthood office in Boston. Every Saturday morning I woke up around 10 AM to the sounds of people singing hymns and yelling “Shame on you!” Cars drove by, honking for Jesus. A tall minister led a crowd of homely women, pot-bellied men, and defenseless children in prayerful song. Among other, more peaceful posters that recommended "Love, not Abortion," some held signs that proclaimed, “The partial-birth abortion procedure is a fetal holocaust not too much different than Hitler's assault on the Jews” and “Abortion is Murder.” The signs depicted horrific, bloody photographs of “aborted children” and piles of dead holocaust victims. In order to buy my groceries, I had to walk past a woman handing out brochures that proclaimed “Jesus Saves!” One time, a frantic protestor grabbed my elbow and begged me to stop supporting the “baby killers.”

These protestors showed up every Saturday, without fail. They prayed and sang and held picket signs. While thousands of brochures filled with extremist propaganda floated in the air or were stuffed into the pocketbooks of college students and local residents, Planned Parenthood escorts walked beside women with appointments for their yearly GYN exam, men getting tested for AIDS, women picking up their birth-control pills, teenagers looking for free condoms, and, yes, some who came to end an unwanted pregnancy. Once a month I walked through a metal detector as a guard searched my pocketbook, so that I could pay for my pills at the pick-up window.

Church-based protests happen every weekend at many similar clinics around the country. Their impact reverberates through the streets and enters uninhibited into the halls of Congress. Influenced by religious right propaganda, Americans increasingly believe that life begins at conception and that abortion constitutes murder. The most common reason for the increase in conservative opinion is the way the anti-abortion campaign have "reframed the national debate, shifting the emphasis from a woman's rights to the rights of the fetus."1

Last year, two laws passed that threaten women’s reproductive freedom. One gave fetuses adult status by stating that if a pregnant woman were murdered, the murderer could be charged with both the death of the woman and her unborn child. The second law made so-called “partial-birth” abortion illegal. Often the safest procedure in the second trimester and used sparingly by doctors, the procedure is taught in medical school as “dilation and extraction.” At this point in the pregnancy, the fetus is three-to-six months along and must be crushed or dismembered in the uterus before it can be removed. Not a much-loved option even for abortion advocates, the law establishes a precedent—a point of entry to outlaw all abortions. Though most of the states allowed abortions for circumstances such as rape, incest, danger to the woman’s life, or fetal deformity at the time Roe v. Wade was won, according to the new law, only a risk to a woman’s life will legalize the procedure.

Roe v. Wade itself has been under attack since the initial decision in 1973. Several restrictions have been upheld in the Supreme Court, most famously the Harris v. McRae decision in 1980 that limited Medicaid funding for abortion and the 1983 Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decision that girls under the age of 15 must obtain parental consent. As NPR recently reported, Judge Harry Blackmun’s newly released correspondence reveals that these subsequent cases were very close calls. States rushed to impose restrictions on abortion after the 1992 ruling that they could as long as the limits did not cause a "substantial obstacle."(See Chart "Most States Limit Abortion.")2 The latest Supreme Court decision was won five to four, and upheld the core of Roe v. Wade, stipulating that a woman’s health be protected through her right to choose, even after the fetus is deemed “viable.” Three of the high court’s judges are over age 70. If any one of them steps down, and George W. Bush wins a second term, Roe v. Wade could be in grave danger.

If you are against abortion but support family planning, your rights are also being threatened. Bush openly stresses his religious belief that abstinence, and not contraception, saves lives. He has been pouring money into a campaign to support abstinence-only sex education, promoting chastity vows in public schools. Most of the curricula for these programs are created by Christian anti-abortion groups, such as First Resort, and do not reflect empirical evidence that such pledges do not prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. A recent federal study found that "among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage, a majority did not live up to their vows." Unfortunately, the rates of transmission of three common STDs, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis, "were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not."3 Furthermore, the current administration only funds AIDS charities and research groups if they maintain that condoms are useless and spread the gospel that chastity is the only surefire way not to contract sexually transmitted disease. AIDS coordinator Randall Tobias has continuously asserted— despite evidence to the contrary — that condoms are not effective at preventing the spread of the HIV virus. Officials have removed references to sex education and condom promotion from the Web sites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for International Development.4

The GOP's prudery is not just a matter of deleting expletives; these policies affect the lives of women all over the world. On his first day in office, the President reinstated a Reagan-era ban on U.S. funding of overseas groups that promote abortions, commonly called the "global gag-rule."5 An analysis of four countries in Africa and Eastern Europe explains how women are affected : In Kenya, staffing in women's health clinics has been cut by 30%, though they provided contraception as well as pre-natal and infant care. In Romania, "a successful program funded jointly by Planned Parenthood and US AID designed precisely to help women avoid abortion can no longer provide condoms to women at clinics where abortions are performed."6 In addition, The Christian Science Monitor has recently reported that "under this administration, the US has cut off funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), citing claims that the agency condones forced abortions and sterilizations in China. A team sent to China by the White House in 2002 found "no evidence" of UNFPA knowledge of or support for such measures, but the funding was still halted." The Alan Guttmacher Institute, an international reproductive-rights organization, released a report saying that "unmet [contraception] need" in developing countries' — deduced from the number of women using "traditional methods" or no contraception at all — translates to "52 million unwanted pregnancies each year, bringing on 1.5 million maternal deaths and more than 500,000 motherless children." Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute, adds that "about one-third of [unwanted pregnancies] result in abortion, and about half of those in unsafe abortion."7

And though the Bush administration and many Republicans oppose the widespread use of contraception, birth control pills, including the controversial "morning-after pill," are prescribed by the millions. On March 11, 2004, an amendment requiring health insurance plans to provide coverage for birth control pills failed in the Senate by a narrow margin.8 While oral contraception costs $30 per pack (some brands are not covered by health insurance and must be distributed with a doctor’s prescription (which only people with health insurance can afford anyway), condoms can be purchased at any convenience store at less than a dollar each, all while Viagra is covered by most health care plans.

Yet women across the nation have been taking the right to choose for granted. Girls raised in the latter third of the 20th century have never known a world in which abortion was outlawed; they do not remember a time when women paid doctors black-market fees for illegal procedures, suffered in back alleys without anesthetics, and died by the thousands in desperate circumstances.

A debate about whether or not a late-term abortion for a teenage girl who could easily give that baby up for adoption is a lost argument. On what grounds could you argue that she should have the right to destroy its potential life? It’s one thing to stand up for the concept of “choice,” and another thing entirely to defend an admittedly disgusting procedure like “partial-birth” abortion, especially when it seems to cross the line between a woman deciding the fate of her own body and a woman murdering a child. We have come to expect that premature babies weighing slightly more than a can of beans will survive and thrive. In part because of improved prenatal care, parents-to-be feel more emotionally connected to their unborn children. Yet it is still a philosophical argument, and if one person believes that life begins at birth, and another believes that life begins at conception, those two people have a gulf between them that may never be bridged.

Surveys show that a slight majority (55%) of Americans support a woman’s right to choose during the first three months of the pregnancy, but many (over 70%) also approve of some restrictions on abortion (See chart "Public Favors Abortion Rights")9 The rhetoric of the debate continues to be accusatory on both sides. Anti-abortion groups label doctors and women “baby killers” while abortion-rights organizations accuse their opponents of being “anti-woman.”10 The political spectrum in 2004 is as sharply divided as it was in 2000, when Gore won the popular vote but lost the electorate, arguably based only several hundred re-counted votes. Some analysts accuse Ralph Nader of stealing the three percent of the population that should have voted for Gore, and warn of a similar disaster happening this November. Bush and Kerry are already pouring millions of dollars into fiery ad campaigns directed to the “swing” or “battleground” states such as Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and
Pennsylvania. Since the Reagan years, the abortion debate has followed party lines closely: Republicans court the anti-abortion vote while Democrats support the pro-choice faction. A split electorate means that any headway by anti-abortion judges, legislators, or executives or any complacency by pro-choice groups could mean the repeal of rights most women don’t realize are on the line: "Abortion is taken so much for granted in America today that most women surveyed by a group of clinics in Washington State did not know that it had ever been illegal."11 As with most issues, there are many silent bystanders who will be affected by the decisions of a few.

Lately, the pro-life side has been much more active than the pro-choice side. The pro-life movement has the advantages of a high-stakes morality and the backing of religious groups. They also have a clear objective and a practical location in which to protest. Anti-abortion campaigners no longer support the tactics of radicals who murder doctors and firebomb clinics. They have turned to attacking the issue piecemeal. By questioning the morality of late-term abortions, and of minors choosing to get abortions without parental consent, they have managed to chip away at abortion rights. By promoting abstinence-only sex education and enforcing the global gag rule, they have pushed their beliefs into public schools and onto the world at large.

The fact that pro-life proponents have a location to picket — clinics such as Planned Parenthood which perform abortions —helps them get their message across. They’re protesting a practice that is happening in this building, on this street, in this town. Naturally their cause seems more practical and logical than a large group of diverse people defending the status quo with a general march on the Capitol.

During the past ten years, pro-life advocates have largely been more vocal in their protests, than pro-choice groups who seem to nonchalantly go about their daily lives . Millions of women who could be affected by the barrage of anti-abortion court cases, laws, and protests, leave their fate up to a few vigilant organizations. Among others, Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America have been fighting the hard fight in the Supreme Court and by lobbying Congress, but without the widespread respect and monetary encouragement they deserve.

Many pro-choice people see the recent legislation passed by Congress and the success of the anti-abortion protests as a scary slippery slope that will return us to the nightmarish days of pre-Roe v. Wade, when more women died of botched alleyway abortions than American soldiers died in the Vietnam War. In 1965, 17% of all deaths due to pregnancy or childbirth were caused by illegal abortions. Before we know it, the right to choose will be a distant memory, a single paragraph in the American history textbooks. We cannot take these rights for granted: they are slipping away from us in steady votes and judicial nominations. The zealotry of the anti-abortion groups,, pushed on by an evangelical crusade, has divided and conquered the voices of moderate Democrats and Republicans, forcing them to the extremes of their parties. Because they believe so strongly that abortion is murder, that doctors who perform abortions are comparable to Hitler’s SS, and that women who visit clinics are threatened by Satan, there is no room for a middle ground, for people who would not have an abortion themselves, but who believe that a woman has a right to choose.

On Sunday, April 25th, over a million people crowded the Mall and marched past the White House to show their pro-choice stripes. I arrived to the sight of hundreds of thousands of people ready for action. It was a gray day in Washington, about 60 degrees, and windy. Posters duck-taped to wooden stakes acted as sails in the stiff breeze. Some attempted humor with various puns on the President’s last name. A pair of young ladies dressed as pirates held a sign topped with a brightly colored parrot. It read, “Arrrr. My Booty, My Choice.” Some posters used logic: “Contraception Prevents Abortion. Save Family Planning.” Others were simply affirmative: “Women are Beautiful and Smart and Competent. We can make our own decisions.” Pregnant women wore bright blue T shirts that read “Pregnant and pro-choice.” Hillary Clinton rose to the podium and her voice echoed between the loudspeakers as her stern face appeared on screens at either end of the Mall. “This is a question of conscience and faith and personal choice,” she said, and the crowd cheered in agreement.

Before the march began, I walked up and down the Mall and noticed old and young; black, white, and Asian; men and women. I met college students who had driven down from Boston and weathered boomers from Ohio. They shared a single goal evinced on a popular sign illustrated by a wire hanger: “We won’t go back.”

As we marched down Constitution Ave, we chanted “Every child a wanted child!” and “Choice! Choice! Choice!” A huge contingent of Texans marched behind their proud Lone Star flag. Several hundred “Republicans for Choice” gathered beside Interfaith organizations, Jewish sisterhoods, and New York Quakers. It was a show of force as unexpectedly diverse as it was powerful. The organizers (Planned Parenthood, Naral, NOW, etc.) started planning it a year in advance. Mailings were sent out and fliers posted months before the event. A web site was created, press releases sent out, and a vast network of people linked to set up this massive protest.

Fairly represented at the March for Women’s Lives was the counter opinion; thousands of pro-lifers lined the streets shouting “March for death!” and “Baby killers!” as we snaked through downtown DC and reached the reflecting pool. Trucks decorated with the worst of the anti-abortion propaganda drove by as we set up on the Mall. A little girl who looked about eight or nine years old shouted at me as I strode past. She wrapped her arms around her father’s waist and narrowed her brown eyes as she said “Babies deserve life.” Her face was distorted by rage and despair. Two of her younger siblings slept in a stroller as one played in the gutter. They avoided the stares of the marchers.

But take a step back and you’ll note that the vibrant crowd was there to attempt to halt a charging bull. That a million women and men were compelled to converge on DC shows how successful the pro-life movement has been in the past decade. Many of the marchers were first-time activists — normally they would be cheering us on from their couches. They came because of their fear and anger, determined to stand up for rights they finally noticed were slipping away.

It is imperative that the pro-choice movement not lay down and allow the religious right to dominate all three branches of government. One gigantic protest (practically a party!) will not change a single aspect of this debate. With our day in the sun behind us, our fifteen minutes of fame over and done with, we must realize that it had absolutely no effect whatsoever on whether or not our children and grandchildren will enjoy reproductive freedom.

We need to show up every weekend at the clinic protests with signs of our own. We need to form human shields to protect women who wish to enter the clinic. If thousands of pro-lifers could show up as a strong counter-protest, shouting at a million jubilant pro-choice marchers, a few dissenting people should frequent the pro-life circuit, proudly protecting women’s rights. We need to show our faces so that they don’t think all of us are “screeching lesbian harpies,” as one conservative talk show host has described us (men included!).

Most importantly, we need to vote in November for enough Democrats to local, state, and federal legislature to turn the tide. Moderate and liberal judges must be appointed to the higher courts. In our complacency, we have forgotten how easily our rights can be taken away. We are now faced with an evangelical government that insists on outlawing choice, even as it refuses to pay for your prenatal care, your infant’s booster shots, or your child’s college education. Bush will tell you in all sincerity, “Women need Love, not Abortion,” but when it comes time to care for that unwanted child, you’re on your own.

The march was not an end in itself. The election in November, both for Congressional seats and the presidency, is far more important. If we don’t win this debate, the other side will. And that could mean a return to the days when family planning consisted of a back alley and a coat hanger.

footnotes/sources
1. See "Surprise, Mom: I'm Against Abortion" by Elizabeth Hayt in The New York Times, March 30, 2003.

2. See "30 Years After Abortion Ruling, New Trends but the Old Debate," by Kate Zernike in the The New York Times, January 20, 2003.

3. See "Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept," by Lawrence K. Altman in The New York Times, March 10, 2004.

4. See the Editorial "Opposition to Condoms." The New York Times, May 18, 2004.

5. See "Abortion" by Kenneth Jost in The Congressional Quarterly Researcher, May 2004.

6. See the Editorial "Victims of the Gag Rule." The Boston Globe, October 12, 2003.

7. "On family planning, US vs. much of the world ," Christian Science Monitor, March 30, 2004.

8. See "Abortion" by Kenneth Jost in The Congressional Quarterly Researcher, May 2004.

9. Sources: Times/CNN poll conducted Jan. 15-16, 2003 (questions 1-2); Survey Research Center, University of California-Berkley, fall 2002 (questions 3-6).

10. See "Abortion" by Kenneth Jost in The Congressional Quarterly Researcher, May 2004.

11. See "30 Years After Abortion Ruling, New Trends but the Old Debate," by Kate Zernike in the The New York Times, January 20, 2003.

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