Pro-choice majority must stand together
By Allyson Hagen, Exective Director of NARAL Pro-CHoice Montana As we mark passage of the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-choice supporters must recommit themselves to activism and advocacy if we are going to protect our right to privacy.
In Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court established that the right to privacy includes a woman’s ability to access safe, legal abortion. While this decision remains the law of the land, it hasn’t stopped anti-choice politicians and their allies from using legislative schemes to chip away at the promise of privacy Roe represents.
Since 1995, states have enacted 610 anti-choice laws. In 2009 alone, 14 states enacted 29 anti-choice measures. And even with Roe's core protections still in place, 87 percent of counties in the United States have no abortion provider, according to The Guttmacher Institute. In Montana, 91 percent of counties have no abortion provider.
Pro-choice supporters in Montana have been successful for the past five legislative sessions in defeating every anti-choice bill aimed at attacking a woman’s right to make private medical decisions. However, these victories have often only been achieved by the slimmest of margins.
At the federal level, anti-choice members of Congress have used health-reform legislation as an opportunity to impose new limitations on women's reproductive freedom. The House passed a health-reform bill that includes sweeping new restrictions on women's access to abortion care, including provisions that would even make it virtually impossible for women purchasing insurance in the new health-care system with their own private funds to obtain abortion coverage.
Puzzlingly, the same anti-choice legislators who routinely launch divisive attacks on legal abortion care also refuse to support publicly supported prevention measures aimed at reducing unintended pregnancy.
On the other hand, pro-choice activists have been working to ensure women have the ability to control their lives and their bodies – making their own decisions regarding birth control, pregnancy and childbirth, and ensuring that all people have access to the information they need to protect themselves against unintended pregnancy and STDs, including HIV/AIDS.
NARAL Pro-Choice Montana recognizes the range of health-care decisions women make throughout their lives, and we have been a leader in advancing a comprehensive reproductive health care agenda that meets these goals.
Our activists have worked in recent years to enact laws in Montana to ensure women’s prescription drug coverage includes birth control, to ensure our young people receive comprehensive, scientifically, and medically accurate sex education so they can make healthy decisions throughout their lives, and to prevent unintended pregnancy by increasing access to preventive family planning services.
Anti-choice legislators and organizations have fought us in these advances every step of the way.
And what’s worse is that, just as we do not have pro-choice majorities in either chamber of the U.S. Congress, we lack pro-choice majorities in the Montana Legislature. And while many pro-choice supporters have been angered by politicians that would use women’s rights as a bargaining chip in health-care reform, we cannot let that anger keep us away from the polls in 2010. We must channel our outrage into political action.
In addition to electing pro-choice candidates to the legislature, we may have another reason to go to the polls as anti-choice groups are seeking to put an initiative on the 2010 ballot that would ban abortion and eliminate the privacy rights of women of reproductive age. This deceptively worded measure is part of a state-by-state strategy to launch a legal challenge to Roe.
Montana’s pro-choice majority must act on its values. Whether it’s a ballot measure or health reform, the stakes are too high to sit the 2010 elections out.
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