Just two months after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and a week after Illinois OKed the procedure on its soil, Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason (or T.R.M.) Howard began performing legal abortions at his Friendship Medical Center in Chicago.
Gosnell’s clinic is an extreme version of what I call “rogue clinics,” facilities that today prey on women, primarily women of color and often immigrants, in low-income communities.
Pro-choice and anti-choice advocates will be busy at the New Hampshire state house on Valentine’s Day this year.
The meaning of “choice” here in Michigan—as in many other states in the country—has eroded a great deal since that day 40 years ago when the Roe decision was handed down. How did we end up here? And more importantly, how do we move forward?
A lot of women seem to be embracing single motherhood because they’ve absorbed their community’s hostility to abortion. But college-educated liberal women generally feel okay about abortion to prevent it, leading to a growing economic and social rift between women.
The anniversary of Roe v. Wade is a reminder that the battle for women’s rights is far from over.
Roe also acknowledges a related fact: until its passage women’s bodies, legally speaking, functioned like production facilities, holding tanks, regulated environments, the property of the men who impregnated them.
It may be true that the pro-choice movement is “more fragmented than it’s ever been,” but this is not because young people are clamoring to overthrow those who are running legacy organizations.
As women’s rights and pro-choice activists continue to sharply criticize the ongoing attempts to grant personhood rights to eggs, it is important to examine what “personhood” actually means, what fetal personhood laws would mean for our movement, and how personhood activists are getting it all wrong.
Faced with polls saying that eight in 10 Americans think abortion should be legal when a pregnancy results from rape, anti-choice activists are actually pushing for more public discussion of the issue. It’s part of a long-term campaign to try to change Americans’ minds and to bring the country closer to banning abortion in nearly all cases.
