politics of choice

[cmotherofpirl]

Politics of Choice
As the pro-life movement gains ground, abortion activists are holding an unprecedented summit to re-examine their strategies—and the ethical aspects of the debate.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Martha Brant
Newsweek
Updated: 11:35 a.m. ET Feb. 27, 2006


Feb. 6, 2006 - Aspen Baker does something most women don’t do: she talks about her abortion. When she got pregnant at 23 she wasn’t ready to be a mother and her relationship was already dissolving. Pro-choice, Baker unexpectedly found herself facing a moral quandary about her decision. “I really struggled,” she says. After the abortion, she figured she’d be given a list of support groups or even just a number to call. But the California hospital that performed the surgery sent her home with only a prescription.

The procedure left Baker relieved, but sad enough to seek out counseling. What she found, though, were mostly judgmental pro-life Web sites and religious groups. Even when her search led her to volunteer at CARAL, the California affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, she didn’t find many sympathetic ears. The battle to keep abortion legal left no room for emotional turmoil. Neither side of the polarized political debate really spoke to her. “Abortion is either tragic or a simple choice,” Baker says. “But I had a lot of complicated feelings about it.”

Today, six years later, Baker finally has a number to call. In fact, it’s a post-abortion counseling hotline that she helped to create, called Exhale. She has joined a new generation of pro-choice activists and abortion providers that is insisting on talking about the emotions—and, yes, morality—surrounding abortion. Exhale recently went national and fields hundreds of calls a month in five different languages.

Now, Baker and other grassroots leaders will finally have a chance to translate what they are hearing for the national leaders of a pro-choice movement grappling with how to counter what they see as recent gains by the pro-life movement. (Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on whether to ban so-called partial-birth abortions. And in South Dakota, the state legislature voted to outlaw all abortions except to save the life of the mother.) This week, on March 3, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress is hosting an unprecedented summit in Washington, D.C. on abortion and morality in hopes of jumpstarting a new strategy. Many activists argue that it’s time for pro-choice leaders to talk about abortion not just as a legal right but as a necessary evil.

Technology has made it nearly impossible to talk about the fetus as just a clump of cells. Medical euphemisms like “cardiac activity” just don’t fly when patients can see a heartbeat with a sonogram at six weeks into a pregnancy. The Reproductive Health Technologies Project has been doing focus group studies for a couple years now. “Women who are thinking about ending a pregnancy are not asking, ‘Is this a life?’ They know that it is. They are asking, ‘Can I take care of this baby?” explains the Center’s Kirsten Moore.


Independent abortion clinic directors like Peg Johnston in New York state—who will attend the meeting in D.C.—even use words like “baby” and “killing” because that is what many women who come to her say and feel. “I’m trying to figure out how I can get [them] through this experience so that [they] can cope,” says Johnston, whose clinic was the target of Operation Rescue protestors and their bloody fetus posters starting in the late 1980s. Today, Johnston shows her patients their own fetal tissue if they want to see it. “Mostly it’s reassuring. You could say we have our own gory pictures,” she says.


Johnston has often been at odds with the pro-choice leadership. That’s why her inclusion in this week’s small gathering—which includes the president of NARAL, Nancy Keenan—suggests a movement finally willing to re-examine itself rather than just blame the right (though there is still plenty of that). One issue that may come up: parental notification. Providers know that having a teen’s parents involved is key to a healthy recovery both physically and emotionally. But interest group leaders are fighting the parental notification laws that are spreading throughout the states. “This is a huge area of abdication,” Johnston says. “In the clinics, of course we want parents involved.”

But since the movement leaders see parental notification laws as just another chip at abortion rights, Johnston is tackling the issue on her own. She is putting together two Web sites, momimpregnant.com and dadimpregnant.com, to help teens figure out how to talk to their parents. It even has a section that teens can give to their parents so they have some idea how to talk back to their kids. “The way we talk about this issue freaks parents out,” agrees Frances Kissling, head of Catholics for A Free Choice, who came up with the idea for the meeting and is co-sponsoring it. “It’s hard to trust us when we present ourselves as callous. The answers to all the questions are technocratic. If we were more honest about the ambiguities and the conflicts people would feel they could trust us and wouldn’t need to pass all those laws against us.”

NARAL’s Keenan is hardly oblivious to shifting societal mores, but she believes these moral questions belong in the religious realm. “We are a political organization,” she says. But there are some signs of cooperation between the grassroots wing of the movement and the pro-choice establishment. About a dozen Planned Parenthood clinics now refer patients to Exhale. Planned Parenthood clinics today often have affiliated chaplains and the national organization recently hired a national chaplain.

Abortion, it seems, has become an ethical matter for pro-choicers as well as pro-lifers. In Pittsburgh, clinic director Claire Keyes took a survey that showed that nearly 30 percent of her patients have spiritual concerns about their abortion. Keyes, who has had two seminarians on staff, has even had a few patients request ad hoc baptisms for their aborted fetus. Soon, she plans to carve out a sanctuary pace in her clinic for meditation or prayer.


Not everyone likes this touchy, feely approach to abortion. Websites like imnotsorry.net celebrate women’s guilt-free right to an abortion, declaring: “This site exists to tell women that it’s okay not to feel sad or ashamed after an abortion. You are not a baby killer. You are not irresponsible. You are not selfish. And, above all, you are not evil.” Meanwhile, Keyes plans to develop her own “heartssite.com” where women can write messages to the baby they never had. It remains to be seen if the new generation of pro-choice activists can get their message through to movement leaders.



© 2006 MSNBC.com

[crazymaine catholic]

i don't know what's worse, not talking about abortions, or talking about them and how they hurt you, and then still advocating for it. how can they really see the logic in this. they know how hurt they are, and they just keep advocating abortion. good grief, you would think they might eventually realize that when something is bad, you just don't do it.

[Norseman82]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='Feb 28 2006, 08:07 AM']Keyes, who has had two seminarians on staff, has even had a few patients request ad hoc baptisms for their aborted fetus. Soon, she plans to carve out a sanctuary pace in her clinic for meditation or prayer.
© 2006 MSNBC.com
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One would think that if one were really concerned about the spiritual consequences, they would try to prevent the abortions in the first place.