Mothers got a pat on the back last month after the flack over whether Ann Romney really did understand the strains on working women, even though Hilary Rosen accurately noted that Ann never actually had to earn a living in order to provide for her five sons, or knew the stress of balancing work-outside-the-home and family.
Staying at home and raising five boys is work enough, to be sure, but Ann Romney used the opportunity to glorify a woman’s right to “choose” – an ironic turn of phrase in so many ways, but in this context, because most mothers do not have a choice in leaving their toddlers to go to work.
While some women may choose to work because they do not want to interrupt their careers, most families depend on two earners – while fathers might still bring home the bacon, mothers have to work in order to keep a roof over their children in a decent neighborhood.
Just three months before, hubby Mitt Romney had a very different take on stay-at-home mothers, who, he said, needed to know the “dignity of work”.
Crowing over his stand on requiring women who receive welfare to work outside the home, he told a New Hampshire audience: “I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.”
A pat on the back and a kick in the ass.
That discussion of how sacred and important motherhood is should have prompted a discussion of how Republican’s brand of austerity for people and tax cuts for the wealthy are cutting access to food stamps – literally taking food out of the mouths of children (they love the fetus, hate the child and they don’t think much of the mother, either), when one in six children in America face hunger.
He also conveniently ignored his support for the Ryan budget which cuts federal spending for Early Childhood education, and just about every other program that would help mothers and children.
But it also crystallizes – though not in a very convenient way – the economics of motherhood – the fact that women continue to be paid 77 cents to the $1 a man makes for the same work, a discrepancy which carries through their working lives and into retirement; the glass ceiling that women experience because they are still the primary caregivers to children in society, the woeful lack of affordable, accessible, quality child care (I paid more for child care a year than I did for four-years of state university).
And to the degree economic strength determines political power, the economics of motherhood is also the politics, which further relegates women to second class citizens.
So, which much controversy was raised over the issue of stay-at-home mothers and, ironically, this matter of “choice,” if Romney and the right-wingers get their way, women won’t have a choice about being mothers, either.
Increasingly aggressive, Republican right-wingers including Mitt Romney would take away a woman’s ability to make her own choices that are critical to her life. What is more significant in shaping a woman’s life than having children? Without access to contraception, women would have more children, limiting a family’s ability to rise up economically, and in fact, condemning that family to a perpetual cycle of poverty, just as large families experience in Third World countries.
Imagine paying college tuition for five children if you are not a Romney.
Without access to abortion, women who are victims of rape and incest would be sentenced to a lifetime of caring for the product of those crimes; and without access to abortion, some women’s lives would simply be cut short and the child raised without the mother.
Instead of jobs-creation, around the country, since sweeping into office in 2010, Republicans have pushed nearly 100 bills to reduce or restrict access to health care and abortions, defunding Planned Parenthood (which for many women is their only access to health care; Rick Perry even refused $35 million in federal money so he could shut down Planned Parenthood); imposing sick, Draconian, torturous requirements as a bar to abortion (forcing pregnant women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, and look and listen to the fetus), imposing waiting periods and adding cost; eliminating the right to an abortion altogether even in the case of rape or incest, and ultimately, pushing Personhood laws that effectively elevate the status of fetus above the mother who is relegated to the status of an incubator.
Topeka, Kansas, even decriminalized domestic violence.
Roy Klein, president of the Nassau County Chapter of the ACLU, tells a story: It is the late 1950s. A woman with one young child finds she Is pregnant; her husband, a decorated WWII veteran, has tuberculosis, and has been in and out of the hospital. This young mother is facing the desperate prospect of being in her late 20s with two children and no means of support. She takes a subway ride to a back alley, where she has a procedure, gets back on the subway to go home. It is rush hour, and she doesn’t have a seat. She’s in pain, bleeding, afraid to mention to what she has just gone through to anybody, because she would get into trouble.
“The story turns out okay,” he continues “The husband lives another 35 years, the woman to her 90s. She has another child, but never forgot the experience of that back-alley abortion.”
Fast forward 40 years.. A wife and mother is pregnant with her third child but is having complications. Her doctor tells her that if she will have to spend the last five months of her pregnancy flat on her back in the hospital, in the high-risk pregnancy unit, where women have miscarriages and give birth to premature, and won’t see her two young sons at home.
But there is an alternative, the doctor tells her: she hasn’t reached the 24-week mark, and could do an abortion, safely and legally in the hospital. The couple considers it, but the father has also seen the sonogram of his fetal daughter sucking her thumb, so pushes for the mother not to abort and to go through the stress of spending 5 months away from her family, flat on her back.
The difference in the ensuing time was that abortion had become legal. A woman – a family – could choose.
The woman in the first story who was forced to get an illegal abortion was Klein’s mother; the woman in the second story who chose to keep her baby despite the suffering and the sacrifice was his wife.
“The baby was full term – she will be 28 years old next week….. Even though abortion was available, that didn’t mean my wife and I would have an abortion. But it was comforting to have the option, and would have been done in hospital by doctor… So you look at the history – what my mother had to go through compared to my wife… A different world,” said Klein, who was the speaker at the Reach Out America meeting, April 11, held at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Shelter Rock.
Things started changing in the late 1950s into the 1960s: there was rising environmental concern locally about overpopulation and what could be done about it; a public health concern about the cost in human life and money in having unregulated, illegal abortions; there was the sexual revolution, women’s movement and feminism and the idea from feminists that birth control, family planning rights were basic rights that were required for equality purposes.
The first major case that set this into motion was Griswold v. Connecticut, in the mid-1960s in Connecticut. Griswold, the plaintiff, challenged Connecticut law that made birth control illegal, even for married couples, even in their own bedroom. The Supreme Court threw out Griswold based on the Constitutional right of privacy – that married people have the right of privacy in their bedroom.
Then, Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972, established the right for unmarried people to access contraception on the same basis as married couples. The court struck down a Massachusetts law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, ruling that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
That’s where the issue stood at the time of Roe v. Wade, in January 1973, when a Texas law banning abortion was challenged. The court used the right of privacy that Griswold established, rather than equal protection of Eisenstadt, to affirm a woman’s right to abortion.
“The reason that is significant,” Klein says, “is that the right of privacy can be balanced against a legitimate state interest; it is harder to throw out if the right is based on equality.”
But during that time frame, from where abortion went from a back alley to a legal, safe and procedure, a new coalition was determined to get rid of Roe v Wade (more cynically, actually using anti-abortion as a political wedge.
Until 1960s, family planning (as it was known) wasn’t a politically charged issue – ex presidents Truman and Eisenhower served together on committee organized by Planned Parenthood to discuss family planning – they were on the same page – in late 1960s, Congress considered Title 10 (passed 1970) – providing federal funding for local family planning centers around the country
One Texas Congressman in the late 1960s said, “We need to make family planning a household word. We need to take sensationalism out of the topic so can no longer be used by militants… who use as political steppingstone.”
That Texas Congressman was George H.W Bush)
In 1969, President Nixon, before signed Title 10 into law, said, “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic situation.”
But Nixon faced a tough re-election campaign. That was the first use of a “wedge issue” strategy to draw some Muskie supporters (moderate Democrats in the South, Catholics and Evangelicals) away from the Democrats, and abortion was the instrument to forge the wedge.
The widening war against women’s reproductive freedom, to go after access to contraception, is truly frightening.
“Without access to contraception, it is estimated a woman would have between 12-15 pregnancies in her lifetime,” Klein said. “Even with access to contraception, 50 percent of all pregnancies are unintended. One in three women seeks an abortion – there are just as many abortions whether they are legal or not. It is not that banning will stop abortions; it would just make abortions less safe.
“For the umpteenth time, we are not talking about a privacy issue or the right to have sex without consequences; this is a fundamental issue of women’s equality – women cannot be told if, when to have a baby.”
Think about the economic consequences for a family having 10, 12 or 15 children. Think about a woman’s ability to work and contribute to society in other ways that go beyond being a homemaker, and what the loss of that human capital would mean. Think about the children who would never be able to afford to go to college, or reach their full potential, especially in the wider context of the Republican strategy.
Klein could have used a third anecdote. It was December 12, 1988 and there was a bad snowstorm. A woman, pregnant with her third child, was badly hurt in a car accident on Community Drive, right in front of North Shore Hospital. She fell into a coma and doctors said that her best chance of living would be if the pregnancy were terminated. Her husband – the father – wanted to abort the fetus in order to give his wife, the mother of his children, her best chance at surviving. But Right-to-Lifers, complete strangers to this family, sued to prevent the family from making their own choice.
He was going to lose his wife and his children were going to lose their mother because strangers thought they had the right to decide that saving someone else’s fetus was more important than saving the life of the mother. That is to say, a mother is not as valuable a person, and does not have the same rights as a fetus.
Ultimately, the strangers lost the case; the baby was aborted and the mother recovered.
Klein notes that even in New York State, if a mother or fetus has a significant health issue after 24 weeks, even if the mother’s life were at risk, the hospital could no longer perform a legal abortion.
Around the country, right-wing Republicans are rolling back Roe v. Wade – actually daring pro-choice advocates to challenge the brazenly unconstitutional laws in the Supreme Court – dismissing, for example the “undue burden” limits that had existed, and now even going after the “incest, rape or death of the mother” exemptions – confident the right-wing activists (The Supreme-ists) will use any excuse to strike down Roe altogether.
This demonstrates Klein’s point that the Roe v. Wade should not have been decided on privacy issues (a 4th amendment right which the Supreme Court cavalierly struck down in the strip-search case this term).
The case should have been decided based on the 14th Amendment guaranteeing Equal Protection – which is the essence of the argument: women should have the right to make their own choices, determine their own decisions, and not become slaves or indentured to the State because someone else has power to determine when they become a mother.
“In New York, you may think we don’t have to worry – New York is a ‘progressive’ state, after all; we had abortion law even before Roe v. Wade,” Klein told Reach Out America. “But what would happen if you are post-24 weeks pregnant and have some type of complication, and your doctor tells you that to continue the pregnancy is dangerous and might threaten your life? Do you have a right in New York? The answer is no. It is a crime under the criminal code to have abortion after 24 weeks and there isn’t any express exception for a women who is in danger.
“Your doctor would go to the hospital’s in-house counsel who will be cautious and not want to get hospital in trouble – no express exemption. So the doctor will refuse. Then what does the woman do? If the woman is somebody of means, she can go to another state where abortion is allowed (though that, too, is increasingly rare). But if the woman is not of means, she will find some not-so-good doctor. Here we are 2012 and she is in the state my mother was in. In 1947….
“The good news is that there is a bill pending in New York that would fix this problem.
“Reproductive Health Act would move the anti abortion rule from the penal law to the public health law so a violation of the rule would no longer be criminal and create an express exception for the health of mother… Governor Cuomo has indicated that he would sign it if passed. The American Civil Liberties Union thinks there may be a window of opportunity to pass this legislative session before June, and one of the things they are lobbying hard for..
“What can you do? If this is something you think is good, could lobby your local assembly person and state senators and governor.”
Link to site where you can sign a petition:
www.nyclu.org/issues/reproductive-rights/reproductive-health-act
Motherhood should be a celebration, not incarceration. Children should be brought into the world who are wanted, loved and cared for.
On Mothers Day there should be a reaffirmation that women should have the right to decide when, where and how they want to become mothers.
Happy Mother’s Day.
