Roe v. Wade 50th Anniversary and a Murfin Memoir of What it Was Like Before

 

I let the anniversary slip by yesterday.  On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade holding that a woman’s right to privacy in the 14th Amendment lets her terminate her pregnancy for any reason “up to the point of viability of the fetus” and for the sake of her health even later. While what was once considered settled, abortion rights are under daily attack by “a death of a thousand cuts” by emboldened Republican led state governors and legislators and the recent Supreme Court Decision that undermined abortion rights and signaled states that there might be no limit to draconian laws to outlaw it and criminalize women, medical staff, and even anyone who supports them.

The fight to preserve women’s fundamental human rights will now be fought state-by-state which is why the National Women’s March chose Madison, Wisconsin instead of Washington, DC for their main action yesterday, January 22.  Women and their allies rallied at the Wisconsin State Capitol for Bigger than Roe March on Madison and National Day of Mobilization.

The Women's March on Madison filled the streets.

Wisconsin is a deeply divided battleground state where long time liberal abortion laws are under attack.  It was chosen because a critical state Supreme Court seat is up for election which could lead to the erasure of reproductive rights.  The Republican legislature is advocating bans and punitive criminal charges modeled on some of the most restrictive in the nation over the objection of the Democratic governor.  Flipping the seat to the GOP would give them a majority to rule on legislative action that overrides the Governor’s veto.

To ensure victory Republicans are trying to use every voter suppression trick in their arsenals including wholesale voter purges, closing or moving polling places in minority areas and Democratic strongholds, limiting acceptable IDs for obtaining registration, limiting early and mail voting, and an array of dirty tricks to mislead voters.  The Women’s March and other organizations are doing whatever they can to counter those shenanigans.

Sister actions with similar aims targeted to local circumstances were held around the country.

What follows was drafted in response to an appeal from NARAL Pro-Choice America a few years ago for stories about life before Roe v. Wade for use in a campaign in defense of women’s right to choose, which suddenly—and back then unexpectedly—seemed under attack again. 

 

A police photograph of Gerri Santoro, a woman who died alone in a motel room after an unsafe abortion, became a symbol of the abortion rights movement across the United States.

For the many of you who don’t remember that far back, this is what it was like before that case was decided.

***

                            The Girl with the Italian Renaissance Hair.  Portrait by Botticelli.

It was about 1971 in Chicago.  We’ll call her Ellen.  She was a friend from college, tall and willowy with Italian Renaissance brown hair.  She had a chorus part in an experimental rock cantata by night and waited tables by day.  She was not my girlfriend.  I wished she was. I was a forlorn looking hippy in a cowboy hat and bright orange goatee—the dopey/quirky best pal in a romantic comedy—the guy who moons around and ends up helping the bad boy with the megawatt smile get the girl.  We met for dinner about once a week and sometimes went out for a drink after her show on a Saturday night.

I came over to her place for dinner one night, Liebfraumilch in a stone bottle in hand.  She was crying.  “I’m pregnant.  I don’t know what to do.”  I held her and comforted her.  I didn’t ask who the father was.  She didn’t volunteer.  It was, after all, the lingering twilight of the ‘60s.

But I was on the staff of the old Seed, the Chicago underground newspaper.  I had connections.  I knew people who knew people.

 

Those people were the Jane Collective, a semi-secret action group of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union who defied Illinois law and arranged safe abortions.  Later I got to know the names and faces of some of them.  They were true heroes in a desperate time.

I helped Ellen get in contact with Jane.  They arranged for her to see a cooperating doctor.  She had to go alone to the appointment, where she was given a chemical abortifacient.  I waited for her in her apartment.

The procedure was as safe as possible, but the cramping and pain from the induced miscarriage was serious in Ellen’s case.  It lasted three days.  I stayed with her the whole time.  We were afraid to seek further medical help.  Other women had been arrested in hospital emergency rooms. 

In the end, the procedure was effective.  Ellen recovered.  She got on with her life.  She went off the next summer on some high adventure and I never saw her again.  I got on with my life.

Within a few years, Illinois revised its laws in response to Roe v. Wade and safe abortions in clinical settings became available.  Jane dissolved.  But I will always remember Ellen’s needless ordeal and will never knowingly allow another woman to suffer so.

Rally for Reproductive Rights in McHenry This Saturday

Note--This rally has been canceled.  Organizer Terry Kappel has tested positive for Covid and is self-isolating.
 

The energy and determination that drew hundreds of people to Crystal Lake for three recent reproductive rights rallies and roadside vigils is coming to McHenry this Saturday, July 9 at 4 pm at the corner of Elm Street (Rt. 120) and Front Street (Rt. 31) near CVS pharmacy.

Veteran local activist and Democratic Party Precinct Committee person Terry Kappel is hosting the event.  He asks people to bring homemade signs, voices, and indignation that basic rights are being stolen from women. 

Kappel says “We need to vote our values, because women’s lives matter too.”

For more information visit the Facebook Event at, call Terry Kappel at 779 302-6212  or email tkappel@hotmail.com.

 

No Longer Lonely Crusaders—How Do We Cope With That?

Yesterday I re-posted a Washington Post poll on facebook  that showed a clear majority of Americans now support marriage equality and that the trend is accelerating.  While obviously something to celebrate, I could not help but preface the post with a sort of snarky comment, “This will be a big disappointment for Unitarian Universalists who are addicted to being in a lonely minority.”

Not that UUs have a corner on this.  It happens to a lot of social justice crusaders who spend years, often most of their lives, fighting the unwinnable battle against enormous odds.  We are used to being the only guy or gal out in the pouring rain with our picket sign expecting to be spit upon.  We are so instinctively counter-cultural that we are suspicious of any popular opinion.

But what happens when after years of diligent work, we wake up and see that it has really paid off—that slowly our concerns were heard, tolerated, accepted, and finally embraced?  The tipping point has been reached and passed.  Suddenly we are in the middle of a Fourth of July parade down Main Street.

It can be a little disconcerting.  Not all of us know how to handle it.  Some can’t resist a smug I-told-you-so attitude.  Some insist on being recognized as heroes and denigrate the Johnny-come-latelies who did not share the early sacrifices.  Some wander off looking for a new lost, lonely cause to invest their identities in.  Some will figure that the battle has been won and abandon the effort.  And many, very many, will simply not know how to shift gears in the messaging and tactics still necessary to translate that new-found majority status into lasting social change.

When I look at the top priorities that the Social Justice Committee at my congregation, formerly the U.U. Congregation in McHenry now trying on the new moniker Tree of Life—A U.U. Congregation in McHenry County, I see that in each case we are now reflective of general popular opinion, or at least standing on ground moving rapidly to a majority. 

1. On marriage equality, despite solid evidence of plenty of support, we still face a hard battle convincing a timid Illinois House of Representatives to take action.    
2. In battling gun violence, we find even more overwhelming support for a broad range of reasonable regulation of the sale of military style weapons, high capacity ammunition clips, universal background checks, and other measures.  Yet the loudest voices in the public debate are the NRA and the noisy gun-obsessed right wing fringe who frankly scare the crap out of everyone with their constant hints at civil war, assassination, and insurrection if they don’t get everything exactly as they demand.    
3. While there is less unanimity on exactly what to do about immigration reform, we find that the old deport-‘em-all-and-build-an-impenetrable-wall sentiment has waned if not disappeared.  Most people are now for some form of a path to citizenship and for fairness to the youthful Dreamers who have spent almost their entire lives in this country.  But simple naked racism and nativism die hard and a lot of economically distressed folks still worry about “them” taking their job.  
4. On reproductive rights, safe access to birth control and abortion as well as frank and truthful sex education in the schools were issues that went mainstream a generation ago.  And despite everything, remains solidly supported a majority.  But complacency that the battle had been won, let a highly motivated, well financed, and intensely angry minority seize a major national political party, come to power in many states, and in Congress and place all of those once safe gains at deadly peril.

It’s not that I disparage the work and sacrifices of those who first broke the ground, risked life and limb and, perhaps worse, ridicule.  I would hope that I could have had the courage to stand with Theodore Parker against slavery, the ladies at Seneca Falls, with all of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.  But in fact all of the movements they fostered matured and won significant victories, even if imperfect ones.  The culture changed.  Only the most vicious and rabid want to go back to the way it was.

The point for us now is that although we are now buoyed by popular support, the battles are not over.  What has changed is how address the issues in this new environment, embrace and encourage our new allies, coax the with-us-in-spirit just a little out of their places of trepidation and uncertainty.  It is changing the message from you should to we can.

Part of that is dialing back the shrillness, the perpetual outrage, the self-righteousness.  It is about being inclusive and not always insisting on being the one out front waving the flag the hardest and shouting the loudest.

It is good to remember what our enemies have taught us.  As the paradigm on these issues has shifted, it was accelerated as much by them as by our efforts.  As they felt the once solid ground slipping out from under them the haters hated more openly and insanely.  The bigots forgot to cloak their intentions.  The uncontrolled rage, the vituperation, the raging paranoia not only scared the bejesus out of a lot of fence sitters and even former allies.  More and more folks simply decided that they did not want to be associated with that kind of ugliness anymore.

And now they do not want to see that mirrored among their new friends.  They want to be part of positive change, and to be with positive people.  To engage them from passive support to participants will require a different voice and a touch of humility.

Look, I am not saying that we never again stand up and loudly and plainly speak truth to Power, or that we are not permitted our anger, only that we need to focus it differently.

That is why the Standing on the Side of Love campaign is so brilliant.  It encourages reaching out and inclusiveness, linking together sometimes isolated concerns and causes under a common human understanding.  It uses the language of love, not righteousness, justice, not revenge.

As the issue examples above show, there is still plenty of work to do.  We need to do it better, smarter, and kinder.  And best of all, we don’t have to do it alone.

Always a Surprise in Kansas Anti-Abortion Bills

A target for bounty hunters.

Note—I saw an article on the Addington Post yesterday which piqued my interest.  I am frankly very leery of the Addington Post as a source.  It is a left/liberal site which often doesn’t let mere facts get in the way of a good argument.  They have a habit of exaggeration and taking things out of context to make their point.  I don’t appreciate that anymore on a liberal site than I would on the Drudge Report or any of the other unit of the right wing echo chamber.

Anyway, the article that caught my attention was about the annual spate of super restrictive anti-abortion laws proposed by Kansas state Representative Lance Kinzer and dutifully passed by the chamber’s large Republican majority.  The man and the party are relentless.  This year the bill included a provision that would bar, in the words of the Topeka Capital-Journal, “anyone associated with an abortion provider from working in a public school. It is meant to prevent districts from contracting with groups like Planned Parenthood to provide sexual education materials.”  The Addington Post reports that the provision would extend even to school volunteers and would “prohibit an abortion clinic secretary from ‘bringing cupcakes to’ school for his or her child’s birthday party.”

In Kansas these days, it is difficult to tell fact from parody.  But apparently, this has a basis in fact.  But it is far from the worst provision of the proposed law.

As I have noted this kind of thing is now an annual ritual in Kansas, which is firmly in the hands of Religious Zealotry wing of the Tea Party.  Almost exactly one year ago I commented on last year’s round of nutty legislation with the following blog entry. 

A careful examination of the nation’s most stringent anti-abortion legislation yet which is hurtling at break-neck speed through the Kansas House of Representatives and seems destined for the promised signature of Governor Sam Brownback, has turned up a previously un-noticed provision—a $500 bounty on the ears of abortion providers, medical staff, Planned Parenthood members, pro-choice petition signers, and women who have abortions or who are overheard asking about them.

The provision at first escaped notice because it was written in Pig Latin and invisible ink on the back of a page.  No matter, sources close to the Republican legislative leadership say, “The bill will pass un-amended and in its entirety.”

The Kansas bill has already attracted national attention and squawks and complaints by the usual suspects for other controversial provisions.  The bill would allow doctors to withhold medical information about the health of the mother and the fetus if the physician believed that information might be used to justify an abortion and exempts doctors from malpractice suits for resulting health problems. Doctors would also be required to inform patients that abortion may cause breast cancer and force women to listen to pre-natal heart beats.

The bill also contains several tax measures aimed at punishing both providers and women who seek insurance coverage for the procedure or who obtain an abortion.  A sales tax of 6.3% would be leveled on all abortion procedures or prescriptions that can lead to an abortion.  No exceptions to tax for victims of rape, to save the life of the mother, or even to have fetal remains removed after a miscarriage—which is still defined as abortion under Kansas law—would be allowed.  In addition women would not be able to claim a medical expense tax deduction for the separate special abortion coverage required under Kansas law.  Providers would be stripped of a range of tax benefits usually available to health care providers.

The bill would also put restriction on teaching how to perform abortion procedures that would probably lead to the loss of accreditation to the University of Kansas OB/GYN program.

Despite the outcry over these and other provisions, even the most knowledgeable pro-choice leaders were shocked to find the hidden bounty provision.  When asked about the need for secrecy, an aid to the House Federal and State Affairs Committee which drew up the bill and is holding hearings on it, said under promise of anonymity, “It’s really for the health of women.  They can’t take the excitement it might arouse, God bless their hearts.”

Experienced bounty hunters from as far away as Alaska are reportedly stocking up on ammunition and preparing to relocate to the Sun Flower State.  “This will be twice as easy as shooting wolves from helicopters and a hell of a lot warmer,” said veteran hunter Orion “Dead-eye” Nimrod.

A spokesman for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, which regulates hunting and has been charged in the bill with administering the bounty program said, “We are excited by the possibility of overseeing the largest cash producing hunt in Kansas history since Buffalo Bill and the hide hunters wiped out the buffalo.  We figure it will take even less time to eliminate abortionists, their clients, and advocates, three to five years, max.”

Responding to concerns that there was no way to be sure that ears submitted to the State for the bounty were actually taken from intended targets, a spokesperson for the jubilant Westborough Baptist Church, a strong supporter of the law, said “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.  God will forgive the innocent, after we picket their funeral.”

Law enforcement officials acknowledge that the system would be challenged to differentiate between lawful bounty hunting and murder.  “We’ll probably have to take the word of the hunters.  And any shooting in the vicinity of an abortion clinic or women’s organization office, or the home of a registered Democrat will automatically be given a pass.”

Some Republican leaders privately expressed concern that a successful bounty program could accelerate already existing trends of population loss, perhaps eventually endangering one of Kansas’s four Congressional seats.  They were relieved when a demographic study privately funded by the Koch Brothers Foundation predicted a population loss of no greater than 15-20% with larger families resulting from future restrictions on contraception making up enough of the loss to prevent the loss of a Republican seat after the 2020 census and reapportionment.