NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri announced its first round of endorsements for 2006 last week. Why should black folks care?
The issue of choice in abortion is one place where some black Democrats depart from most of their party colleagues. Surrounded by so much despair and death, the black community’s instinct is to side with life every chance it gets. The Republicans know this and exploit it in every election cycle. Abortion is one of several so-called lifestyle issues the GOP works relentlessly to trim off that slim margin of black voters it needs to keep its seats.
The question is not one of individual conscience – it is proper to keep one’s own conscience and let it be a personal guide. Everyone on both sides of this debate is repulsed by abortion. The question is whether individual conscience should be legislated – and whether or not the candidates pretending to take the higher moral ground on this issue actually have the best interests of the community in mind and at heart.
For starters, black voters need to take apart a false opposition, starting with the terminology used in this debate. To be pro-life, on the side of life, is not to be Pro-Life, opposed to the abortion option. How can that be? Let the EYE count the ways.
The most zealous proponents of Pro-Life (Anti-Choice) legislation are the same people who oppose state and federal subsidies for social services – for all the things a baby and his or her family need to grow and thrive. Veterans of the abortion battles – and this is a nasty war, complete with actual casualties, as some sicko picks off an abortion provider with a rifle on a regular basis – know the deal. The Republican majority believes that life begins at conception, but its respect for life stops at birth. Pro-Life legislators like U.S. Senator Jim Talent would force a pregnant woman to have a baby she knows she is not prepared to support, and then kick out from under her all the social programs that might help her carry the heavy load of another human life.
Yes, we are talking about babies having babies. We all agree that this is not, in almost all instances, a good idea. And, yes, we agree that the best strategy is to reach these young women (and the young men trying to get in their pants) BEFORE the deed is done and the seed sown.
Guess what? The Pro-Life Republican majority is on an abstinence-only kick that would gut governmental subsidies for contraceptives and the education kids desperately need to make the right decision in the bedroom, backseat or behind the roller rink. That is anti-choice and anti-life.
On the other hand, NARAL and Planned Parenthood devote much of their resources to preventing unwanted pregnancies, not terminating them. Pro-Choice activists and legislators are not perverts who want to see women go through the enormous emotional pain of abortion. They are realists, who see that, for all the Bible thumping and scare-mongering in this country, young people are still having unprotected sex in large numbers. NARAL and Planned Parenthood try to reach these kids and their families before it’s too late.
And, yes, they also want to extend the deadline on when is “too late.” They want a young woman – or any woman – to have the right to say, “I made a mistake, but I don’t want to inflict that upon an unborn child and the society that has made it clear it won’t give me the support I need to raise that child. I want to have an abortion.”
That is a tough choice.
But it shouldn’t be a tough choice, even for a socially conservative black voter, to side with Pro-Choice legislators. They tend to be, realistically, pro-life. They tend to vote for legislation that most benefits the neediest among us, too many of whom to this day have black skin.
Let the Republicans fool you with their Pro-Life, charismatic Christian rhetoric, and you will get another dance with the likes of Talent and Matt Blunt and George W. Bush and the other guys in gray suits who are busy ruining a great state and country.
So, these are the folks the Pro-Choice advocates are endorsing:
State Sen. Rita Days (Senate 14)
State Sen. Joan Bray (Senate 24)
State Rep. Rodney Hubbard (House 58)
State Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford (House 59)
State Rep. Connie Johnson (House 61)
State Rep. Robin Wright Jones (House 63)
State Rep. Rachel Storch (House 64)
State Rep. John Bowman (House 70)
State Rep. Esther Haywood (House 71)
State Rep. Maria Chappelle-Nadal (House 72)
State Rep. Margaret Donnelly (House 73)
Ingrid Owens (House 74)
State Rep. Sam Page (House 82)
Jake Zimmerman (House 83)
Martha “Marty” Ott (House 86)
Martin Komo II (House 90)
Beverly White (House 92)
Genevieve Frank (House 93)
State Rep. Jane Bogetto (House 94)
Judi Parker (House 95)
State Rep. Michael Frame (House 105)
The role of state legislators will be increasingly crucial on this issue. Pamela Sumners, NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s executive director, said at the event, “It’s no secret that the path the Supreme Court is on, with a case involving the Federal Abortion Ban being heard this term, means that states, and not the women who live in them, will choose when and whether to terminate a pregnancy, and in what circumstances.”
Speaking to a group of roughly 100 supporters, Sumners continued, “Missouri is standing at constitutional ground zero, but Missouri is still standing. And we need your help to stand up to Missouri Right to Life, Matt Blunt, and a band of renegade right-wing legislators who do not care that most Missourians think pharmacists have a duty to do their job of filling prescriptions, think abstinence-only sex education defies common sense, and do not believe abortion should be criminalized. Our governor has publicly equated birth control with abortion and wants to get rid of both.”