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Jane Kramer reflects on life before Roe, and on our re-entrance into the era of a right-to-life:
“Today, most of the women in this country were post-Roe v. Wade babies. They grew up knowing that the struggle was won. It couldn’t happen again. But it has. …this time, we should all be ready for the fight”
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/141vaJe
Photograph: AP.
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"As someone born in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I grew up taking the legality of abortion as a given. It struck me as an immutable part of How We Live Now, a battle that earlier generations had fought and largely resolved. I realize today how wrong that presumption was—how ignorant, in particular, of the experiences faced by huge numbers of women across America who still have to overcome serious obstacles in order to obtain reproductive care."
— Sarah Stillman on the reality of Roe v. Wade, forty years later: http://nyr.kr/Svwukc -
Roe v. Wade in the Archive
Roe v. Wade is turning forty next week. A look back, through the New Yorker archive: http://nyr.kr/UBcbAi
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade—the anniversary is on January 22nd—the debate over the case, and abortion, hasn’t cooled off. If anything, it has only become more controversial. “[Roe] was, I think it’s safe to say, the galvanizing force of the new right, the religiously oriented conservative movement,” Jeffrey Toobin says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. He and Jill Lepore join host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Roe and the politics surrounding abortion and contraception today.
Listen to the podcast, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/SSbntA
(Source: newyorker.com / The New Yorker)
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This is Forty→
Jill Lepore on the “backlash argument” that has followed the Roe v. Wade decision, made forty years ago: http://nyr.kr/V9MuXD
Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty.
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"You often hear the argument that it’s patronizing when political candidates appeal to women about women’s issues. What women voters really care about is what everybody cares about, and this year, that’s the economy… Moreover, the fact that sometimes gets lost in this parsing and claiming of voter motivation is that access to contraception and abortion are economic issues. They are matters of health care, as the Democrats like to emphasize, and they are moral matters, as the Republicans like to. But there is a reason why the dramatic rise in women’s work-force participation in the nineteen-sixties and seventies coincided with the wider availability of a reliable birth-control pill and abortion. Women’s ability to pursue education and careers is predicated on their ability to plan when they will give birth. The health and prospects of their families rests in part on mothers’ access to reproductive health care. When some, usually more affluent, women can easily obtain birth control, and others cannot, that has real economic implications, both for individuals and for social equity. Romney and Ryan would prefer that your forget it, but women’s issues are everybody’s issues."
— In today’s Daily Comment, Margaret Talbot considers what women voters want. Continue reading. -
If Todd Akin Wins…
“If you are trapped in a room with Newt Gingrich and he tells you that you have a “moral obligation” to do something, what is your best move? What if the room is, as it was for certain listeners, in an Italian restaurant in Missouri, and he is telling you that you must support Todd Akin—the Senate candidate who, this summer, started talking about “legitimate rape”—saying that it would be “historically irrational” for you not to, and you have the distinct sense that he is about to start talking about the elections of the eighteen-sixties if something isn’t done?”
Amy Davidson on what it will mean if Todd Akin wins the Senate race: http://nyr.kr/Orynxq
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In working on my book, I went to Rwanda in 2004 to interview women who had borne children of rape conceived during the genocide. …At the end of my final interview, I asked the woman I was interviewing whether she had any questions. She paused shyly for a moment. “Well,” she said, a little hesitantly. “You work in this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a deep breath. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?” she asked. “I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her I see what happened to me and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone turned almost fierce, challenging. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?” she repeated.
Perhaps Todd Akin has an answer for her.
"— “The Legitimate Children of Rape” - Andrew Solomon on the historical relationship between rape and pregnancy: http://nyr.kr/RsAKyQ(Source: newyorker.com)
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Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about “legitimate rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on the trauma of rape and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely limited mental capacity who are conned by predators, or on patients who have been told by their physicians that a full-term pregnancy may kill them. Forcing such women to bear a child violates their integrity in a barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.
Judith Thurman on Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, and the abortion debate: http://nyr.kr/SJtwrP
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Evan Osnos on what the Chinese have made of the Todd Akin scandal: http://nyr.kr/OyEFHR
Photograph by Jeff Roberson/AP Photo.
