Woman as Reason
March 2000

Politicians vie to control women's lives

by Terry Moon

Campaign 2000: Can Bush convince the Right that he's more anti-abortion than McCain? Can Bradley persuade us that he's more pro-choice than Gore? Is anyone dumb enough to think that Pat Buchanan is not the anti-abortion "extremist" Jesse Ventura calls him? Or, is the more important question: why is women's right to own our own bodies a political football? Furthermore, we must ask: how is it that even with a pro-choice president, abortion has become so difficult to get that the number of abortions is the lowest it's been since 1978 and poor women are systematically denied their rights?

Given that reality, there is something obscene in the incessant drumbeat of male voices pontificating this way or that on what is or is not going to happen inside women's bodies. While we chant in demonstrations that it's "OUR bodies! OUR lives! OUR right to decide!" election rhetoric shows that those who aspire to rule this country believe it is THEY who rule our bodies and lives.

Surprisingly, NARAL (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), a group that has never before endorsed a candidate during the primaries, decided to insert itself into the fray. Unfortunately, they did so, not to raise an independent feminist banner, but to support Al Gore even though Bill Bradley has the better record. NARAL's president, Kate Michelman, tried to do damage control and obscure NARAL's obvious sucking up, by sputtering about abortion being "far too important to be squandered as a wedge issue between two pro-choice candidates."

Her claim that NARAL didn't like Bradley "using the issue divisively as a weapon to divide pro-choice voters" was revealed as ludicrous when Gore instantly put out a commercial saying he has "stood up to the extreme right wing-defending a woman's right to choose. Endorsed by NARAL, America's leading pro-choice group." And while Gore is now using NARAL "as a weapon to divide pro-choice voters," you can bet that he will never say what NARAL's initials stand for because then he would actually have to use the word "abortion," rather than its unmessy euphemism "pro-choice."

While neither Gore nor Bradley may be able to stop the speedy whittling away of women's right to control our bodies-as Clinton's seven years in the White House have shown-there can be no doubt that the election of either Bush or McCain would spell disaster and more women's deaths. In South Carolina, whose Republican primary was won in February by Bush, there isn't one abortion provider in the entire state.

While Bush and Rush Limbaugh have successfully painted McCain as a liberal and soft on abortion, and many independents and disgruntled Democrats seem to agree, the truth is they are equally horrible. McCain supports school vouchers, missile defense and the death penalty, and opposes affirmative action and gun control. As for abortion, the fanatical National Right to Life Committee gave him a 100% approval rating for seven years.

And Bush, he's signed 17 Texas anti-choice bills-every one that comes across his desk. There is no question that if either Bush or McCain wins the White House, women's tenuous hold on the right to control our bodies will be even more rapidly destroyed.

But while all contenders for presidential power-and the leadership of NARAL too-may view abortion as the political football they don't want to fumble, they forget at their peril that it was women who forced the Supreme Court to rule favorably for Roe v. Wade with years of agitation and tens of thousands of us marching in the streets as part of a mass movement for freedom. It is a revolutionary movement that has the potential to make changes, while what we are experiencing is the limitations of changes that come from above.

That women's right to abortion is more than a device to get more votes is clearly revealed in how young women see this question. At a pro-abortion meeting recently in New York, women went around the room saying what Roe v. Wade means to them. No one said, it means I can get an abortion if I want. They said: self-determination; choices; women's autonomy; women defined as human beings; empowerment; control of our lives; choices without men telling us what we should be; complete health care; rights for women and men versus the police state; privacy; a great step toward equality; and one woman said all those things at once when she said it means freedom.

Clearly, women are not prepared to let our right to control our own bodies be reduced to an election gambit for men who see it only as a device to help them win political office. The right to a safe, affordable, accessible abortion means-and it has always meant-our right to control our own bodies in every sphere. We cannot be free if we have no control over our bodies, and women are determined to be free. But if that determination can not find a home in a mass movement, one guided by the necessity for revolution to be total from the start, we will end up trying to choose the lesser of two, four, or more evils, all the time knowing that that choice will never move us closer to freedom.