I can't believe we are still fighting for abortion rights. In 1973 after the Roe decision, I thought the battle had been won. How wrong I was.
When I went to a pro-choice demonstration in DC in the early 90's, I couldn't quite believe that we were still fighting this battle. But I was heartened to see so many young women there and thought that soon this would be settled and we wouldn't be wasting our energy fighting for this basic right. Wrong again.
When I dragged myself to DC for the 2004 March for Women's Lives I began to worry that I might be fighting this battle until my dying day. Bush was president and had the power to shape the Supreme Court for years to come.
Now we have a Democratic president and a Democratic congress, yet we're still fighting an energized anti-choice movement. But supporters of abortion rights are energized as well. According to NY Times , Nancy Keenan, Executive director of NARAL describes us old folks as "a menopausal militia"--women who can remember a world without access to safe, legal abortion. (Most women my age know someone, either directly or indirectly, who died from or suffered serious complications from an illegal abortion.)
Young women may lack this direct experience, but many see access to safe, legal abortion as a right and they don't want health care reform to endanger that right. So I expect to see at a lot of young women at the rally/lobby day for abortion rights in DC on Dec. 2.
One concession to age: I no longer take the bus. There is no way I can get to Center City Philly by 6:00 and then return to Philly at 9:00 for a 17 hour day. I plan to drive down the night before, stay in DC overnight, and get up at a reasonable hour in the morning. I've paid my dues--40+ years of taking the bus to marches in DC. Unlike so many of my friends, I've never enjoyed the experience. I went out of a sense of obligation. I've always been a little phobic about crowds and was never really comfortable marching around with like-minded folks chanting slogans in unison. My politics may have collectivist tinge, but temperamentally I'm an individualist.
But there are times when you just have to stand up and be counted.
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Unfortunately, I think it is the nature of the system of American government that questions like this will never be fully settled. Whatever we can do to solidify the right, the opposition can do to destabilize it.
We can pass laws -- they can pass laws to overturn. We can have the Supreme Court make declarations -- they can stack the Court, and overturn the decision. The more ground we take, the more virulent the opposition becomes ... and the more ground we lose. I have come to believe that this particular subject is simply too controversial to ever have a definitive answer.
Barring a Constitutional Amendment specifically mentioning a right to abortion (which might fail ratification -- and which could be overturned via the same process), I don't think its a fight that will ever end.
kbz
It's very frustrating. So frustrating that it really does make you wonder - why ARE we still having THIS fight? I was 20ish in the early 90's, and had the feeling you had then, that WTF? feeling. I was reading recently about how the anti-abortion people didn't waste a moment and once roe v wade was decided they went on an offensive attack and never stopped - I don't have any links handy, but it wasn't too hard to find information about the earliest post-roe happenings with google
I read one time about before abortion was illegal- before it was originally declared illegal and restricted, and from I can remember, way back when, it was the domain of midwives, and "non-medical" people, and that the American Medical Association were big supporters of "regulating" the practice, which really meant restricting it... the impression I had was that back then, when it was 'midwives' doing it, there weren't as many people dying as after the "regulated it" It wasn't a very detailed history, just an overview - I always mean to go back and reading about that again.
But it's interesting to read that when we think about 'before roe v wade' we think of that as the time when it was "illegal" but before that it was neither illegal nor 'legal', that they had framed the restriction itself as "legalizing" it when it was actually imposing "regulations on it" and wasn't supposed to make it "illegal". It resulted in poor women being unable to get abortions but rich women with the right doctors still could.
That's strange. If abortion were illegal for 36 years would you throw in the towel and accept the status quo as stare decisis, settled and not to be messed with?