April 04, 2004
March for Women's Lives
On April 25th (3 weeks from today), seven women’s advocacy groups will be marching on Washington D.C. in the March for Women’s Lives. I’m sorry I didn’t mention this earlier, as I had planned, but there’s still time to arrange to go if you are interested.
The march’s purpose is, according to their website, to uphold choice, justice, access, health, abortion, and global and family planning. Note, the march was previously called the “March for Choice”, but the name and cause was broadened to help bring several other groups on board. However, the focal point remains abortion rights.
I will not discuss the abortion issue much here. I already laid out my opinion briefly here and will probably revisit the topic in much more depth later. You pretty much have to be actively ignoring the issue to not have know the arguments on both sides by now, but suffice it to say that I consider myself Pro-Choice for libertarian reasons.
For those who would take abortion rights for granted, recent events should have served as a wake-up call. In addition to the PBA ban (which I still believe was always intended to be struck down by the courts), Dubya has also recently signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA), which allows prosecutors to charge a second offense to criminals committing a federal violent crime who, intentionally or not, also cause the termination of a pregnancy.
On the surface, the act seems rather uncontroversial and narrow-reaching (note it only applies to criminals already in the act of committing a federal offense), and an obvious reaction to the headline-grabbing trial of Scott Peterson. However, Pro-Choice groups decry it as a back-door attempt to grant legal personhood to a fetus. From WorldNetDaily:
But pro-abortion groups protest, saying the measure is carefully worded in order to create a “personhood” status for developing fetuses. Instead, pro-abortion groups support an alternative measure by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., titled the “Motherhood Protection Act.” Under that proposal, a pregnant woman would become a specially protected class, making it a penalty-enhancing crime to commit a violent act against a pregnant woman that interrupts or terminates her pregnancy.
Lofgren’s Motherhood Protection Act would, for crimes involving termination of a pregnancy, extend the sentence to twenty years, or to life if the sentence would already have been that long, and does so without endowing legal rights to the embryo. Of course, the UVVA bill passed and Lofgren’s bill is still stuck in committee, which tells you what the issue really was about.
There was also was the recent revelation (not a surprise to some) that Roe v. Wade was nearly overturned in 1992 during Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Chief Justice Rehnquist had a five-justice majority to overrule Roe, but at the last second, Justice Kennedy changed his mind. This was revealed in the recently unsealed papers of Justice Harry Blackmun. The New York Times has an excellent in-depth retrospective of Blackmun as well as a neat multimedia presentation.
Combined with the prospect of Justice O’Connor’s impending retirement in the next few years, and one thing is clear. The fate of abortion rights is very much up in the air and could very well hinge on who wins the next presidential election.
And thus, the March for Women’s Lives on April 25th. If you cannot make it to the march but would like to help send some student activists to Washington, send your tax-deductible contribution to the delegation my wife is organizing at:
Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance
San Jose State University
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192-0161
