Pro-choice march exposes volatile rift on abortion
The Detroit News
Friday, April 30, 2004 The following are excerpts from The Detroit News’ syndicated columnists and others on Sunday’s March for Women’s Lives pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C.: - - - Kathleen Parker, Orlando Sentinel: We have taken our gravest contemporary concern — the sanctity of human life — and reduced it to a carnival of the grotesque. The defining demeanor of the crowd was ugly and uglier. Profanity and obscene gesturing toward the pro-life crowd were commonplace. My guess is that marchers’ angry words and actions were visceral reactions to the ugliest scenes of the day — huge photographs of aborted fetuses at various stages of development. These sights are not for the squeamish, and surely not for the children some pro-choicers dragged along. I’m not in favor of criminalizing abortion, but I am in favor of an honest — even brutal — assessment of what abortion is and what abortion does. Pro-choicers are wrong to dress up abortion as only a woman’s choice, and pro-lifers are wrong to insist that women who choose abortion are “baby killers.” No one gets an abortion for the pleasure of it. In all likelihood — and this is where I place my chips for now — abortion will eliminate itself once truth is allowed a fair and open hearing. - - - Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe: Sunday was pass-the-baton day. It was the day the next generation was called upon to make a commitment and a connection between, as their mothers called it, the personal and the political. And of course, it was about whether young women will or won’t be able to make decisions about sex and health and pregnancy. Kate Michelman, the retiring head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, one of seven groups sponsoring the march, put it this way: “We know that the pro-choice movement needs to speak to and activate a generation that doesn’t remember life before Roe (v. Wade) and we need to do it before George Bush gives them a chance to experience it for the first time. I want to be the storyteller, not the one helping them through the horror of back-alley abortions.” The anti-abortion movement has had success not only in focusing on the fetus, but in associating unplanned pregnancy with irresponsibility. For two decades, access to women’s health has been chipped away, especially for poor women. But as long as the right to choose exists, this generation has had the luxury of ambivalence about individual choices. But now we have peeping John Ashcroft, who wants to rifle through clinic papers. We have a national policy to teach abstinence as the only sex education. And across the globe, the administration’s “gag rule” against clinics that would even mention abortion has closed down women’s health and birth control centers in the name of democracy. So there was a march to jump-start the next wave of activists and show that, as organizer Alice Cohan says, “You are not alone, no matter what the Congress may enact or the press may say.” - - - Michelle Malkin, Creators Syndicate: Beautiful young actress Ashley Judd went to Washington last weekend wearing a crucifix and a trendy little T-shirt that boasted: “THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.” Ashley’s message to millions of young American women and girls: Opposing the partial-birth abortion ban is fun. Morning-after pills are cool. Sex without consequences rules. One wonders what Ashley’s mom, beloved country singer Naomi Judd, must have thought. Naomi has spoken eloquently for years about how she firmly rejected abortion as an unwed teen and repeatedly witnessed the miracle of life as a labor and delivery nurse. “I’ve seen ultrasounds ... you know that those babies are real,” she told TV talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael in 1998. - - - National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy: The March for Women’s Lives has brought together more than a million people who believe that the fight for reproductive freedom deserves their energy, their passion and their commitment. The million marchers represent tens of millions more at home who are unified on these demands and dedicated to protecting our right to abortion, birth control and all reproductive services, including our right to have children and determine our own family formations without government interference. Women’s lives and health are on the line as never before, and the National Organization for Women is determined to take reproductive rights off the bargaining table — forever. Women’s lives and liberties are not negotiable.
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