January 22, 2007: 34
years ago, the Supreme Court decided to make abortion legal. The decision came about because people
took to the streets in massive numbers to demand basic rights for women.
Today, the Bush regime threatens to take away that right,
consign women to the dangers of and deaths from back alley abortions, and
enforce a “traditional role” for women in society. This is all part of the moves towards Christian
fundamentalist theocracy that are well underway under the Bush administration.
The 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade should be a
wake up call to the very real danger of abortion being banned, and the urgent
need for massive political resistance to keep the right to abortion, reverse
the whole direction the Bush regime is taking society, and drive them out of
power. Below are three things that bring
this reality home.
Bush’s pick a reminder of what’s not right
By Sara Paretsky, creator of the V.I. Warshawski novels
Full article published in the Chicago Tribune January 7,
2007.
From the beginning of his presidency, George W. Bush has
done his best to undermine a woman’s right to adulthood. His latest effort has
been to appoint Eric Keroack to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services’ Office of Population Affairs.
Keroack has some unusual beliefs about women and sex: Women who have sex
outside marriage, he says, use up their “bonding” hormone, oxytocin,
and are unable to form lasting relationships. In a 2003 talk to the
International Abstinence Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Keroack called
premarital sex a form of “germ warfare,” and he has said
contraception “demeans women . . . degrades human sexuality and is adverse
to human health.”
If he ran the country, abortion would likely never be permissible, even if
pregnancy could cause a woman’s death”
Little girls, Bush and Keroack are telling us, you must have
our permission for anything you do in the privacy of your beds and doctors’
offices. And if you do what you want without our permission, we will see that
you are punished: We will force you to become pregnant–because we will deny
you access to contraception–or we will tell you to risk death if you want to
end a pregnancy”
Bush’s appointee to head the Office of Population is someone
who thinks women are too immature to make fundamental decisions about their own
bodies. This is not a total surprise. After all, in 2002, Bush appointed W.
David Hager–who opposes contraception and advocates prayer as the only way to
treat premenstrual syndrome–to head the Food and Drug Administration’s
reproductive health drugs committee.
Bush also appointed Alma Golden–who opposes contraception and sex
education–to oversee implementation of Title X, the nation’s only federally
funded family planning program. He issued rules in 2002 making a fetus eligible
for federal health dollars while explicitly excluding the pregnant woman from
coverage. And on his watch, abstinence is the only sex education we fund for
public schools with our federal tax dollars.
Bush also has made decisions about pregnancy, birth control and abortion for
women in Third World countries. Since 1973,
the United States
has refused to allow any foreign aid to be spent directly on abortions in any
country that receives our aid. However, in 1984, President Ronald Reagan
promulgated the global gag rule (also known as the Mexico City policy), which
forbids any U.S. aid to go to clinics that perform or even discuss
abortions–even if these services are kept strictly separate from other
treatment, including prenatal and obstetric care.
Although President Bill Clinton rescinded that Draconian policy, one of Bush’s
first acts in office was to reinstate the gag rule. In fact, he expanded its
reach by demanding abstinence-only education and repudiation of prostitution as
a condition of U.S.
aid.
Removal of U.S.
aid has had a devastating effect on poor countries. Nations throughout Africa
and Eastern Europe have been forced to close clinics because, without U.S.
help, they don’t have the resources to provide contraception, sex education or
prenatal and obstetric care, according to Population Action International, an
advocacy group that supports population programs grounded in individual rights”
Worldwide, some 46 million abortions are performed every year, according to the
Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organization focused on sexual and
reproductive issues. Of these, 19 million are unsafe–performed by untrained
people or performed in places dangerous to the woman’s health. More than a
quarter of those unsafe abortions–5.3 million–result in death or serious
long-term health problems for women each year. These women could have their
lives or health safeguarded with access to good clinics, reliable and
accessible contraception, or safe abortions.
This means that in the six years of Bush’s presidency, more than 30 million
women have lost their lives or health because they did not have access to
health services. We’re not talking about people who can get on a plane or in a
car to go to a neighboring clinic; we are talking about people who don’t have
access to education or travel, and who depended on our aid to save their lives
and health”
I’m tired of this same old road, with these same old men, telling me, my
nieces, my goddaughters and my granddaughter what to do with our bodies, while
they make up fake science and worse theology to support their ideology.
I want to be on the freedom trail, where women as well as men are adults, where
we–not Daddy–decide what we do with our lives and our bodies, and where the
government stays out of our vaginas.
Cristina Page, author of “How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America”:
The
following speech was given at a teach-in held Oct. 30 in NYC called
“It’s Worse Than You Think: Where the Bush regime is taking the world
and why it must be stopped”.
Here are a couple of widely held
misconceptions:
1) President
Bush is pro-life–false
2) The Right to Life Movement is concerned about preventing abortion.
You see, when president Bill
Clinton presided over the most dramatic decline in abortion rates in
the
recorded history of our country. The right to life movement didn’t send
him any
thank you notes. After witnessing how policies that furnished Americans
with
greater access to contraception led to fewer abortions being sought,
the Bush administration
decided on the very opposite approach. Why? Because the policies that
lead to
dramatic declines in abortion are offensive to the right to life
movement.
Today, there is not one pro-life organization in the United States that
support
the use of birth control. Rather, stripping people of the right to plan
a
family, rolling back access to contraception, is now a foundation of
the
pro-life agenda. The war against contraception in the United States is
well-under way, well financed. And thanks to their steamy coupling with
the Bush administration, the war against family planning has racked up
some
important victories.
Let me underscore something for
you. We know what works to prevent unintended pregnancy. What most people don’t
know, but should, is that the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the
world are the ones with the strongest pro-choice policies, like Sweden, Norway
and the Netherlands. You would think
that for the honest pro-lifer, this should be of interest. More concerning,
however, is that the agenda they insist upon has only proven to fail. Why is it
that the countries with the highest abortion rates in the world are the ones
that have enacted the strictest pro-life policies, the very strategies proposed
by the US pro-life movement and currently executed by the Bush administration?
Take abstinence only. We”ve routed
over one billion dollars in federal funding to abstinence only programs.
Interestingly Sweden through out those programs over thirty years-cited their
dismal effectiveness- after implementing comprehensive sex education programs
Sweden enjoyed a 70% decline in teenage pregnancy. We don’t even need 30 years
of data to prove to us what works. Let’s just look at the results of when Bush
was Governor and invested unprecedented sums in abstinence only in Texas. The
result? Texas scored dead last in the nation, 50th out of 50, in the
decline in teen births. In fact, while the rest of the nation enjoyed dramatic
declines in teen pregnancy, by the end of Bush’s term as Governor. Texas had
one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country exceeded by only four
other states, including Florida, which his brother governed using the same
approach. When Bush became president, he boldly took the dead last approach and
prescribed it for the rest of the nation.
The steamy relationship Bush has
with his pro-life base is lucrative one too. One in four federal dollar for
abstinence-only money goes to pro-life groups. And probably the reason these
programs fail is because those designing them are not interested in reducing
teen pregnancy, their interested in proselytizing to children about their
God. Take The Virginity pledge programs,
one called the Silver Ring Thing, got over a million dollars in federal
funding. It’s executive director explained, “we”re not really putting our
energy into abstinence as much as we”re putting it into faith-abstinence is the
tool that we”re using to reach children.”
So, it should come as no surprise
that when Columbia and Yale researchers studied kids in these virginity pledge
programs and compared them to kids not in virginity pledge programs, that the
virgin pledgers had the same rate of STDs as non-pledgers. The only difference
being that virgin pledgers were six more likely to have oral sex, male
virginity pledgers were 4 times more likely to have anal sex, the virgin
pledgers were also less likely to us a condom, more likely to spread the STDS
they have because they don’t get treated for them.
The pro-life movement has found a
friend in George Bush because they share a disdain for information, evidence,
proof, truth. When the pro-life movement asked Bush to appoint an abstinence
only ideologue to over see the nation’s contraceptive program to the poor, Bush
said yes. We now see that the poorest Americans are seeking out abortion
services more. When the right to life movement asked Bush to cut contraceptive
benefits to federal employees, Bush said sure. When they asked him to appoint
an anti-contraception fanatic to the expert panel that approves contraceptives
in the FDA, he said I will. And that was the choice that led the FDA, our
nation’s premier scientific agency, to make its first ideological, religious
decision in its history-denying the over-the-counter application for emergency
contraceptives. When asked whether the
President supports birth control, his spokesman dodged, only willing to say the
president supports “a culture of life.”
When the pro-life movement asked
Bush to de-fund the UN agency that provides contraception to people living in
the poorest nation’s on earth, where family planning is nothing less than a
life-saving technology? Bush said -where do I sign? The loss of that 34 million dollars, 12% of
the agencies budget, led to, worldwide, 12 million more unintended pregnancies,
5 million more abortions, 374,000 infant deaths, 27,000 maternal deaths-and
that’s each year.
A Culture of Life? Pro-Life? The
facts say otherwise.
YOUR GOVERNMENT moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.
Do you want these people to be the last judge of the right to abortion? |
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“We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled.” |
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“The constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.” |
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Chief Justice John Roberts:
Justice Samuel Alito:
Justice Antonin Scalia:A Fact Sheet:
-
On his
very first day in office, George W. Bush reinstated a global “gag rule” on
abortion. This gag rule, called the Mexico City Policy, stipulates that
non-profits must scrap all services relating to abortion in order to keep any U.S. money for international
family planning (coming through the relief agency USAID). He later
extended this policy to all international family planning programs[1] -
In the
developing world, the Mexico City Policy means that the number of illegal
or “back-alley” abortions increase dramatically, because without funding,
many clinics must shut their doors (a clinic serving over a quarter
million people in Kenya
closed after USAID funding was withdrawn.) There are 20 million illegal
procedures performed each year, and 70,000 deaths annually from illegal
abortion procedures[2]. -
In
November of 2003, the Bush regime signed the “partial-birth abortion” (a
non-scientific term made up by the pro-life movement) ban into law,
implementing the first-ever nationwide ban since abortion became legal
with the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. -
The
Dept. of Justice, under John Ashcroft, has requested the records of women
who have received abortion services[3]. -
Seven
states, including Illinois, Louisiana, and Kentucky have either trigger laws to
ban abortion immediately if Roe v. Wade is overturned or have statements
of policy that display the same intention for immediate bans. -
Extreme
pro-life activists have been appointed to fill important positions
throughout the Bush Regime. Anti-choice governor Tommy Thompson heads up
the department of Health and Human Services, abstinence-only advocate Alma
Golden runs the nation’s family planning program Title X, and
anti-choice/Christian fundamentalist doctors opposed to contraception and
all forms of abortion (even the morning after pill, which is not in fact
an abortifacient) make key decisions delaying or preventing access to
celebrated new contraceptives and abortifacients while they
disproportionately dominate FDA advisory boards[4]. -
Although
it is unconstitutional and currently being challenged in the Supreme
Court, Congress passed, and Bush signed into law, a Federal Abortion Ban
in 2003. This ban would outlaw abortions as early as 12 to 15 weeks in
pregnancy. -
Experts
consider the fact that the Bush Regime has stacked the Supreme Court with
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. (refuses to state his views on women’s
right to choose) and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. (has a record of hostility
toward women’s rights and privacy rights) ominous, and that these appointments leave the
states one more Bush judicial appointment away from prohibiting abortion[5] -
The
Centers for Disease Control, a (government) agency under HHS, has recently
reclassified all women as “pre-pregnant” and recommends that physicians
hold standards of prenatal care above other health concerns for women,
celebrating pregnancy as the ultimate achievement and goal for women[6]. -
In
March of 2006 South
Dakota banned all abortions except those performed to save the
life of the mother. There are no exceptions provided in this law for cases
of rape or incest. The law was passed “in hopes of drawing a legal
challenge that will cause the US Supreme Court to reverse its 1973
decision legalizing abortion.”[7] -
The
Bush regime has passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which gives a
fertilized egg legal status distinct from woman. This law is a clear
threat to the foundations of Roe v. Wade.[8]
[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20010123-5.html
[2] Esther
Kaplan, “With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right.”
[3] “The War
on Women: A Pernicious Web”, Planned Parenthood special report, www.plannedparenthood.org
[4] Esther
Kaplan, “With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right.”
[5]
Stateline.org, June 22nd 2006
[6] Washington Post, May 16th
2006, page HE01
[7] CNN.com, “South Dakota
Bans Most Abortions,” March 6th 2006
[8] “The War
on Women: A Pernicious Web”
For Further Info:
PBS’s Frontline- “The Last Abortion Clinic In Mississippi”
Audio of Dr. Alan Berkman, Columbia University on Attacks on Global Public Health and Reproductive Rights from the Bush Crimes Commission.
Book Recommend: How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America by Cristina Page