Ellen Shaffer on Roe v Wade Celebration, Jan. 22, 2014

Ellen Shaffer, Director and Co-Founder, Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust Women
Remarks
Celebration of the 41st Anniversary of Roe v Wade
American Association of University Women – Los Altos/Mountain View Chapter; and the
Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust Women
Los Altos, CA Jan. 22, 2014

We’ve accomplished so much since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion on Jan. 22, 1973!  We’ve won competence and independence, and kept our sense of humor. There have been tremendous changes in our professional, educational and personal opportunities. Women have entered professions that were virtually closed to us, including medicine, journalism, science and the law.  We’re catching up as engineers and members of Congress, though much progress remains ahead. We’ve continued to have children, and to build families and communities.

We still earn only 70 cents to the dollar earned by men.

We need support for employment, including child care, and paid family leave.

And we need to preserve and expand access to legal, affordable abortions and to birth control, as a fundamental human right.

The Trust Women/Silver Campaign aims to build visibility for this important agenda.

To link it to our trust in science.

To build unity and momentum in our movement.

We face several threats this year.  And we have some encouraging signs, including the Women’s Health Protection Act, and a pending resolution at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

First, the assaults.  There has been a rash of measures enacted at the state and federal levels that are intended to reverse our progress, and specifically our access to abortion and contraception. As many of us have heard, states adopted more such restrictions in 2011-13 than in the previous decade.  The House of Representatives introduced the “right to let women die” bill,  that would authorize hospitals to withhold lifesaving abortion care, even if it meant the mother would die.  So far a slim majority in the Senate has kept these bills from becoming law.

At the state level, we’ve seen an explosion of “TRAP” laws, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers.  As Dahlia Lithwack noted in Slate (11/13/13), “The anti-choice strategy has been to close as many clinics as possible and to sideline as many providers as possible by crafting … regulations that force women to view ultrasounds, listen to inaccurate medical scripts, and find time to undergo multiple appointments; that force doctors to attempt to obtain ever-elusive hospital admitting privileges, and that force clinics to widen hallways and rejigger broom closets” to meet standards intended for hospital surgery suites.  The requirement for MD licensing is a deliberate obstruction. Where abortions are under fire, some doctors who perform them may not reside in the area.  If they do practice locally, there have been campaigns to deny them hospital admitting privileges for that very reason. In the rare case of an emergency during or after an abortion, the woman would be admitted to a hospital, but often under another doctor’s care.

In California, it’s been impossible to pass restrictive legislation or ballot measures at the state level, and in most local areas, so the opposition acts as picadors, generating misinformation and promoting ignorance.  Flouting – and obscuring – state law, several Catholic universities have attempted to cancel covering abortions through the insurance provided to faculty and staff.

What is particularly galling about these campaigns is the occasional pretense that this assault is actually good for us, and motivated by a tender concern for the wellbeing of women and children.

In San Francisco, anti-abortion rights groups are this week displaying banners claiming that “Abortion hurts women.”

During a debate over the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” or HR 7, an anti-abortion bill currently advancing in Congress, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) suggested that Republicans support restricting access to abortion because it will ultimately benefit the economy if women have more children.  Goodlatte noted that carrying pregnancies to term “very much promotes job creation.” [Dara Culp, Think Progress, Jan. 15, 2014]

This has been going on for awhile.  And til now, women and our representatives have been somewhat stunned.
A new bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, is starting to turn this around.

Again, Dahlia Lithwick: “The bill is an effort to reaffirm Roe and Casey by pre-empting state efforts to enact measures like heartbeat bills, fetal pain legislation, and regulations that result in clinic closures, added expenses, and unnecessary delays.  It’s worth being perfectly clear that the bill will likely never pass the GOP-controlled House. But what’s important is that it represents Democrats—including male Democrats—taking a strong, long-overdue stand against state efforts to simply nullify Roe v. Wade with legislation that assumes Roe has already been overruled.

“The purpose of the new bill is to force states to prove that the dozens of measures ostensibly aimed at protecting women’s health actually do that. It would no longer be enough to simply assert that anything the state deems necessary to promote a woman’s health, does so. The law forces states to either find a meaningful connection between the regulations and a woman’s health, or openly admit they just want to end abortion.”

Not only that.  We expect to have legislation imminently that will challenge the Hyde Amendment, the notoriously destructive provision that prevents federal funding for abortions.  Low-income women are vastly more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy compared with women earning 200% or more over the federal poverty level – in fact, they’re 5 times more likely.  The Hyde Amendment has been both ideologically and directly responsible for this divide since it was first adopted in 1976, and never challenged.

This is a key year for us to become informed, to join together, to show that we Trust Women to make our own decisions about our health and our bodies.  We know that we all benefit when women can safely and effectively decide whether and when to have children, and to experience the social and economic support we all require to assure that we raise our families in safe and thriving communities.

Right now, Trust Women has three immediate opportunities for you to collaborate:
Sign the TWSR petition (http://www.coalitionpetitions.org/lies_about_abortion_hurt_women) asking San Francisco City officials to take down the false and misleading banners stating “Abortion Hurts Women.”  It points out:

Campaigns to defund and stigmatize abortion, and impose repressive views about sexuality, disempower and subordinate women and girls, and prevent them from choosing and using the vital reproductive health care services they think best. In addition to legislation, tactics include violence against abortion providers, and harassment of patients at health centers. These actions hurt women and girls.

Next Tues., Jan 28, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a resolution condemning the anti-abortion banners.  On Feb. 4, they’ll present an additional resolution supporting the Women’s Health Protection Act.  We’d welcome your visit up to see us in San Francisco.
A new development this year is the emergence of a solidarity group, Men Who Trust Women.  I’d like to invite Joe Brenner, Director of Men Who Trust Women, to say a few words.

And once again, thanks so much to the American Association of University Women for creating and maintaining this wonderful annual celebration of Roe v Wade, and for inviting the Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust Women to enjoy this great day with you.

 

 

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