The pro-abortion movement in the United States recognizes that it has lost the cultural battle and is preparing to destigmatize it
It’s the story of one in four women, but for them it all becomes taboo. That dark secret that is only quietly shared with close friends who have been through the most. “We’re where we are because we don’t talk about it. The Christian right has done an amazing job in recent decades stigmatizing abortion,” admits Blair Wallace, a reproductive health strategist in the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Division of Sexuality and Gender Equality. ) of Texas.
Last Friday was a day as dark as those secrets he would like to erase from the hearts of all women who have had abortions. Take the guilt out of their guts, as they did with those suffocating cells that threatened to take the power of their lives in an unwanted metamorphosis. ‘Say the word’ is the slogan of Planned Parenthood, the largest family planning organization in the United States.
Enough euphemistic paraphrases to talk about “women’s reproductive rights.” Joe Biden, the first Catholic president since John F. Kennedy, went to such lengths to avoid the word that there is even a website dedicated to tracking him (www.didbidensayabortionyet.org). How is it not going to drown out the voice on the phone of a woman who has to make an appointment for it? The most Puritan society wants him to say it only in a whisper, with a sense of guilt, penance for his sorrow, forever hiding the dishonor in the depths of his soul. Wallace wants them to tell the four winds, scream it until they don’t panic anymore and exorcise those ghosts. Only then will they obtain redemption.
“Say it for a week. And then for a month. And then, one year,” she instructs her activist sisters in a workshop held as part of the Arena Summit, the organization born after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory to train activists across the country. It’s time to tell what’s been preserved for years, to personalize it and create the empathy that’s withheld from outsiders.
The reality is that ‘everyone loves someone who has had an abortion’. And when the stories come up, they’ll notice. A kind of #MeToo that makes abortion a good thing to be thankful for. I wouldn’t be here today without him, said Cecile Richards, the nation’s leading activist and mother of three, who, like the more than 300,000 women who have abortions through Planned Parenthood each year, said during an interview on Arena. Summit, she decided when it was time to have them.
She has just arrived from Dallas, where she has been interviewed by the pastor of a church that helps Texas women travel out of the state to terminate their pregnancies. The man has told his own abortion story in the air, because just as men “get pregnant” these days, abortion is a matter of two. Or it should be. It takes a cultural change that society has overlooked because the right to abortion in the US was taken for granted, there was no need to fight it.
“Hard times lie ahead,” Richards just told hundreds of women and men who have come to Austin to prepare. The battle to restore the right to abortion could take decades as Supreme Court positions are for life, but it starts with a personal story. For dismantling the discourse of the Christian right, which has been able to profile itself as ‘pro-life’, when no woman who has had an abortion ever speaks out against life.
That effective movement has also defined activists as ‘pro choice’, despite the fact that many women feel they have no choice. “To choose is to choose one cereal or the other,” Wallace instructs them. “Aborting is a decision every woman makes.”
That’s what they’ll be referring to from now on, the right to make their own decisions. The abortion movement will be just that, a pro-abortion movement, without guilt or shame. Many elections will have to be won to ensure that there are enough pro-abortion politicians who in turn elect like-minded judges when lifelong Supreme Court positions open up. There’s no time to lose, you can’t wait for it to come. “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago or twenty years ahead? The best time is now,” Wallas says emphatically.
The French government wants to include the right to abortion in the constitution to guarantee the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy. The Republic on the Move, the party of the president, Emmanuel Macron, will introduce a draft constitutional law to protect “the right to abortion” in France. Aurore Bergé, head of the ruling party in the National Assembly, announced this on Sunday.
The Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, confirmed via Twitter that the Executive will “firmly” support this bill. “For all women, for human rights, we must engrave this heritage in marble,” said Borne, the second woman in French history to hold this position.
Macron on Friday deplored the decision of the United States Supreme Court to revoke the right to abortion at the federal level, which will now depend on each of the 50 states that make up that country. “Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. It must be protected,” said the French president.
In France, abortion has been decriminalized since 1975 with the so-called Veil law, which bears the exact name of its promoter Simone Veil, who was Minister of Health, President of the European Parliament and Holocaust survivor. Under current law, an abortion can be performed up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.
Source: La Verdad
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