How to use this Page

Last week, as we stopped for a traffic signal, I spotted a bumper sticker that I had never seen before. I want to share it because it speaks the truth and our country needs to wake up to that truth.

Pro Choice is a lie,
Babies don't choose to die! 

I remember when Rowe vs Wade took affect. At that time a woman who was unmarried and pregnant had few choices. She may not have had access to birth control. She had to carry the burden of shame, the man didn't. She probably could not get a job to support herself or if she had one she very well might lose it. She might not even be able to find a place to live because of the shame and the lack of funds.

The man was not judged for getting her pregnant nor was he held responsible for the child they conceived together. He didn't need to fear losing his job and he might even have bragged to his friends about what he had done. So it was the woman and the child who suffered.

Is it any wonder that "some" of these women turned to back alley abortionists, killing their unborn child and risking their own lives in the process? Many died. Many developed infections or other damage and found themselves unable to ever have a child.

I remember feeling sympathy for these women, stuck between a rock and a hard place that they did not create alone. 

Then the Supreme Court stepped in....now our courts could have held the father responsible and forced him to support the child and provide for the woman....or they could have made it illegal to deny a woman a job or place to live because she was pregnant....but no!  The Supreme Court in all of its wisdom decided that abortion would be acceptable if we could only convince people that a fetus is not a human being....that a fetus is just tissue....that this tissue isn't something living that feels pain...therefore we can rip it out of a woman's body, dismember it without the pangs of guilt for having murdered a child. Shame on them and shame on us!

Women today have many choices: abstain from sex, use birth control, carry your baby to term and give it up for adoption, or carry it to term and love it. She can pursue child support through the courts and she can continue to hold down a job and support herself and her child. Abortion shouldn't be anyone's choice. Abortion is not birth control! This is a different world, wake up!!!

Tweet

This Saturday is the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Believe me when I say that I could write for days on the significance of the decision, and even more about recent news and the current state of reproductive rights. If I tried, I could probably recount verbatim the conversation I once had with Sarah Weddington (the lawyer who argued Roe at the young age of 26!). But I won’t. For now, I will simply offer the following excerpts from Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America by Sara Dubow. To those of you who celebrate it, I wish you the happiest of Roe Days.     –Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

For most of the twentieth century, abortion was simultaneously proscribed and practiced. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey reported that nine out of ten premarital pregnancies ended in abortion and that 22 percent of married women had had an abortion while married. In 1955, the continuing demand for abortion motivated Planned Parenthood’s medical director Dr. Mary S. Calderone to organize a conference featuring women testifying about the hardships of dangerous and unwanted pregnancies, and physicians advocating for liberalized abortion restrictions. Whereas the American Medical Association (AMA) had led the nineteenth-century movement to criminalize abortion, it was now in the vanguard in an incipient movement to legalize it. In 1960, physicians at the AMA annual convention argued that laws against abortion were unenforceable, thus undesirable, and in 1962 the American Law Institute (ALI) endorsed the liberalization of abortion laws.

*          *          *

Not satisfied with reforms that kept the power to grant or refuse an abortion in the hands of doctors and hospital boards, grassroots activists began advocating for the repeal of all abortion restrictions. In 1969, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was founded at the First National Conference on Abortion Laws, and the radical feminist group Redstockings held the first speak-out on abortion.  In 1970, the New York state legislature legalized abortion, an act endorsed by Republican governor John D. Rockefeller.  In 1971, a national poll showed that more than half of Americans favored legalizing abortion, the American Bar Association issued a statement supporting the legalization of abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in Roe v. Wade. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ended the nearly century-long prohibition against abortion in the United States. In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun made clear the Court’s desire to remove the abortion question from the abstract realms of philosophy, theology, and morality and place it in the concrete realm of law: