August, 2005

The national fight by anti-abortionists, un-winnable for the time being, is being fought instead in the states, where it's making considerable headway.

As an instance, both Florida and West Virginia passed legislation recognizing an embryo as an independent victim of homicide. Missouri has a special session coming up in early September, called by the governor to consider three anti-abortion proposals. A near record number of laws have been passed in various states this year regarding various restrictions on a woman’s access to both abortion and contraception.

The national attention is on Judge John G. Roberts, but the national pressure is building quietly and effectively, state by state. That pressure and that direction and that oratory is male dominated, by an enormous margin.

Preachers, priests, pastors, evangelists, legislators, lobbyists, fund-raisers, contributors, the conservative core and the wild-eyed fringe are overwhelmingly male. There was a time in human history when priestesses were in the driver’s seat, but that was a way long time before the men hijacked religion and marched off to this or that inquisition, crusade or witch-burning.

Women’s attitudes seemed to be “Look at the little dears, off to another war” as they bent over the stew-pot, sending their offspring to be slaughtered. Not a priestess-like role.

Women now have the vote and many of them are senators, representatives, governors, CEOs, astronauts or scientists. But there’s a left-over tremor in their collective voice, a harkening to past cringings-in-the-shadows, as if they need permission to be heard, as though at any moment some man will come along and vilify them for their opinion, take away their hard-fought victories and cast them back into the kitchen and nursery.

I wonder how . . .

• Margaret Whitman (CEO) at eBay
• Anne Mulcahy (CEO) at Xerox
• Hillary Clinton, Senator from New York
• Oprah Winfrey, entertainer
• Melinda Gates, Chairman, Gates Foundation
• Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State
• Zoe Cruz (President) Morgan Stanley and
• Abby Cohen at Goldman Sachs

. . . feel about these issues. Senator or CEO, make no mistake, men will control your reproductive life if they can. If you let them, that is. And if you think this issue is a hot-button topic for someone else, you’ve sold out your sex for a big title. Too controversial for you to take a stand?

If not you, who? If not now, when?

All of you are rich as well as powerful and I won’t point at your wealth as a primary reason to not become involved, because how could I know? But it is a fact that abortion rights are the rights of the not-wealthy. If you have the bucks and your particular state’s laws don’t accommodate, then it’s merely a plane ride and a good hotel to another state. Before Roe vs. Wade, no rich women were out there at risk because they all had the dough to go elsewhere, even if elsewhere was Europe with a vacation thrown in. No, it’s the poor and the scared and the powerless who pay. It’s always been the left-out and the set-aside who pay, who are told in church that their riches are to be found in the next world.

The wealthy want theirs now and get it. Occasionally, the rich and powerful stand up for the poor and scared and powerless and, if there ever was a time for it, the time is now.

I don't begin to know Margaret or Anne or Hillary’s opinions regarding abortion. I grabbed their names because they're movers and shakers. They, along with Oprah and Melinda, Condy, Zoe and Abbey, may all be against it as can be, but they should be heard.

They belong in this debate.

Powerful men have always made men’s issues known. That’s what kept Augusta National Golf Club all men . . . power. Powerful women owe it to their less powerful sisters to be heard and to use their power as it’s needed.

Otherwise men will just send them back to the nursery, when and as it suits their purpose. It stupefies me that in a country where women have more than half the vote, they seem to have less power than the measly four million NRA members. The NRA has kept us from any sort of gun control with stunning effectiveness by calling on their members as a voting bloc.

Women have been as stunningly ineffective in demanding and getting control over their own reproductive systems.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today