By Marcia Pappas
President NOW-NYS
McCain…Obama…McCain…Obama…McCain…Obama... You're in the voting booth, ready to pull the lever, punch the card, touch the screen, or write in your preference. Your passion is reproductive rights for ALL women, because without that autonomy and self determination, any women's rights gained in the past forty years are for naught.
And make no doubt about it, reproductive rights are under relentless siege in the United States and around the world. Already young women, some of them impregnated by abusive relatives, must jump through the legislative hoops of mandatory parental consent and/or judicial review by anti-choice judges. And in many states, poor women seeking birth control must fight through picket lines while those needing abortions must travel hundreds of miles for far more visits than are necessary, sometimes encountering obstacles that are actually life-threatening.
For women with money, securing an abortion has always been easier. But even these women with means are far more at risk than is generally suspected among this current generation of Americans who have grown up with reproductive rights as a fact of life. Under our next president, all women will find it more difficult to obtain reproductive care, even if the status quo remains on the Supreme Court. And indeed those women who cannot get the services they need will again be dying of botched or back-alley abortions, as did young Becky Bell of Indiana , not so long ago.
Many feminists and women’s rights supporters are convinced we must elect Obama to protect the US Supreme Court and women’s reproductive rights. They know that McCain has persistently promised to appoint anti-choice Supreme Court justices who will overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a privacy right.
But would our reproductive autonomy be any more protected by an Obama presidency than by McCain's? In his recent effort to placate right-wing fundamentalists, the presumptive Democratic nominee has announced he will expand, to the tune of one half billion dollars, Bush’s "faith-based" initiative which distributes federal tax dollars to sectarian religious groups, most of whom lobby extensively against women's reproductive rights and lesbian/gay civil rights. The program itself flies in the face of our Constitution's required Church/State separation. And Obama, the ostensibly pro-choice candidate wants to EXPAND this theocratic machinery?
Many churches have “relief funds” through which they receive money to run programs for immigrants and the poor. If the available funds for helping needy women are funneled to service providers such as Catholic Charities, how will these poor women even know about much less get birth control so they will not be forced to bring into the world children they cannot support. Where is the “relief” for these girls and women? And doesn't this increase, rather than reduce the need for abortions?
Finally, does anyone connect the dots about the "faith-based" expansion and the fact that Catholic leaders in Richmond , VA just fired four Commonwealth Catholic Charities workers because they helped a poor Guatemalan teenager obtain an abortion? This is the same organization that already receives $7.6 million a year in federal funds.
Is it really too late? The Democratic Convention is not until August. Only a tiny percentage of super delegates would have to change their declared preferences, to pick the real, feminist, pro-choice candidate, and to curtail this sea-change shift to the center by yesterday's liberal who is today's new religionist. We of NOW-NYS oppose Obama's "faith-based" politicking. And we want a true supporter of women's rights in the White House. Hint hint, she’s really pro choice.
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