“I think it is a landmark decision along the road we must take toward the emancipation of women and I make no apology for that whatsoever.”
by digby
Here’s some more wonderful news from the laboratories of democracy, via Bill Moyers:
As we note the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bill [Moyers] discusses the fierce challenges facing the reproductive rights movement with Jessica González-Rojas, Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and Lynn Paltrow, founder and Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Though a majority of Americans now believe abortion should be legal in most cases, anti-abortion forces showing no sign of relenting. A study by the Guttmacher Institute reported that state legislatures passed 92 provisions restricting a woman’s access to reproductive health care in 2011 — a number four times higher than the previous year.
“What’s happened is that women are beginning to recognize that what’s at stake is more than abortion,” Paltrow tells Bill. “It is their personhood — their ability to be full, equal, constitutional persons in the United States of America.”
Watch the whole discussion if you have the time. It’s enlightening and intelligent. This is about far more than compulsory childbirth:
And this piece from 1987 with Moyers and Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the decision, is kind of astonishing. You forget these days what liberals used to sound like.
“I think it is a landmark decision along the road we must take toward the emancipation of women and I make no apology for that whatsoever.”
And he was entirely right — when it comes to human freedom, faster is better.
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