At the risk of offending feminists and abortion-rights activists alike, I'd like to point out that the abortion-rights controversy has proven to be a successful, working political strategy that has mousetrapped progressives and benefitted the Radical Right.

Let me explain. The REAL issue here has ALWAYS been reproductive rights as a whole and access to contraceptives. It's a shell game with the Radical Right focusing the marks' eyes on the abortion shell while they pocket the pea of contraceptive access. Radical Right political activists have framed this issue as being about abortion. They have successfully used abortion as their bloody red shirt and as a tool to rally their troops, recruit politicians, and bamboozle the rest of the electorate--and both abortion-rights activists and other people interested in womens' health HAVE LET THEM.

Abortion rights activists and people interested in womens' health in general should stop playing the Radical Right's game and start framing the discussion around access to womens' health. And with the Radical Right successfully gutting funding for womens' clinics around the country, progressives have an issue.

If she responds, I'll post her reply.

You and other activists interested in reproductive rights may also wish to check and see just how many of the same faces and organizations involved in the anti-abortion movement are ALSO involved in the stealthy and increasingly-successful campaign to suppress womens' access to birth control. You'll find an awful lot of the same jokers showing up again and again.

And don't let yourself get sidetracked just looking at the Catholic Church. Rather a LOT of Evangelical Protestant and Dominionist outfits are also participating in the sneak attack on contraception.

In addition, it might also be worth pointing out that a lot of these womens' clinics provide many poorer women with health services they couldn't get or afford elsewhere. If the Radical Right succeeds in shutting these clinics down, they'll have nowhere to go.

Also, the same politicians who vote to gut Planned Parenthood not only offer up utterly inadequate "alternatives" to PP and other clinics offering womens' health services, but they constantly vote to cut funding for the rural clinics that would have been getting the influx of new patients.

I don't know if framing a political campaign in terms of "our wives, our sisters', our children's health versus your (right-wing) political career" would be successful, but I can hope.

Since the beginning of the movement, the pro-choice community has framed this fight in terms of women’s health. When I first began speaking out in 1967, it was in terms of the number of women being killed and maimed due to illegal abortion, and the movement has been doing that ever since. Blaming pro-choice activists for the political influence gained by the right-wing is not because we aren’t carrying the right message. It is attributable to the powerful, wealthy forces we have to fight; and the right-wing politicians and preachers who have found a gold mine in saying they are “pro-life.” The fundamentalist churches and the Catholics have literally poured millions of dollars into this battle; and have no qualms about endorsing candidates from the pulpit, yet the IRS does nothing about it. Not only that, under the Faith Initiative, the Feds have given over a billion (that’s with a B) dollars to these so-called crisis pregnancy centers run by anti-choice people who have the express purpose of propagandizing and deceiving unsuspecting women about abortion. The anti-abortion terrorists have blown up clinics, killed doctors and staff members, and threatened patients. A lot of people who are pro-choice are scared to express their opinions for fear of violence against them or their children, losing their jobs, or facing social ostracism. When I headed up the Oklahoma NARAL, people tried to run me off the road twice. I received personal threats. People left nasty notes on my windshield because of my pro-choice bumpers tickers. My car was covered with key scratches. I went to stores to buy office supplies for NARAL and they refused to sell things to me because I was buying this for an “pro-abortion” group. Forty million women have had legal abortions since 1973. In each of these abortions, other people were affected – the man who caused the unwanted pregnancy, parents, best friends, spiritual advisers, and so forth. So abortion has touched almost every family in this country either directly or peripherally. And the hypocrisy is rampant. My friend was the executive director of the local clinic, and endured almost most daily demonstrators at the clinic. She actually wore a bullet-proof vest to work during a period when the clinic was bombed three times. Yet several times, some of those very demonstrators came to the clinic dragging a teenage daughter for an abortion. The next day, they would be out on the line with the “Christian” friends denouncing abortion. So if the writer is blaming feminists because the right-wing is using abortion as a whipping girl, he or she has fallen into that age-old trap of blaming the victim.

No, I think that the anti-abortion people framed their attack on reproductive rights as a whole as their crusade against abortion.

BUT

I think that too many people involved with NARAL, too many people with Planned Parenthood, too many progressives in general, and too many politicians and media news-critters allowed the reproductive right struggle to be framed by the right as dealing with abortion. I think a lot of people at PP never dreamed that cutting off access to contraception and gynocological care would become mainstream Republican doctrine.

I have better things to do with my time to engage in mutual recriminations with people who favor reproductive freedom. We've got a situation here; I think we ought to do something about it. I think we ought to find ways of getting the point across that the Raidcal Right's war with abortion is about womens' and couples' reproductive rights as a whole and the right of women to seek health care.

But, I don't know whom you mean.

Quote: "I think that too many people involved with NARAL, too many people with Planned Parenthood, too many progressives in general, and too many politicians and media news-critters allowed the reproductive right struggle to be framed by the right as dealing with abortion." Who are these traitors to women's rights, autonomy, and health care?

I am sorry if you felt stung by Dr. Santee's reply, but I point out that the recriminations you deplore were not 'mutual' until she replied to your post.

Do you have ideas for re-framing the struggle so that it is not defined by anti-choice forces? If you do, I'm sure many would love to get involved. How can individuals help in this endeavor?

Traitors? Beg Pardon? I must have missed something.

I NEVER said there were any traitors.

I DID say that there were a lot of people with PP and with NARAL who let the Radical Right successfully recast the struggle for control of their bodies as a crusade against abortion. I NEVER said that they deliberately doing it, NOR did I say they were traitors. They didn't realize that they were being out-manouvered by social, religious, and political reactionaries affiliated with the anti-reproductive rights bunch using the anti-abortion campaign as a diversion to distract away from their real agenda. I DO say that folks at PP, NARAL and elsewhere weren't paying attention to the Radical Right's REAL game and they got sucker-punched in their way just as the gullible, credulous and impoverished right-wing voters who vote for anti-reproductive rights politicians are continuing to get snookered by right-wing politicians and right-wing Ivory Tower clerics.

Does the expression "playing fat, dumb, and happy" mean anything to you? For the record, playing fat, dumb, and happy IS NOT TREASON.

I AM saying that something happened--pro-choice people got snookered by right-wing anti-abortion fanatics and their willing right-wing politician collaborators. I hardly think that constitutes calling fellow pro-choice activists traitors or calling for Stalinesque political purges because a lot of the family planning and abortion rights leadership got blindsided by something they hadn't expected.

As I said, a lot of good people at NARAL and PP were blindsided by the Radical Right's tactics. I think it's time to wise up, pull together, and say that the Radical Right's anti-abortion campaign is a smokescreen to conceal their very real campaign against women's health and reproductive rights.

Pro-choice activists and volunteers have saved more than a million lives since 1974 by working to keep abortion safe and legal, and they have endured many hardships for more than 40 years to achieve that goal. Their message is framed now as it always has been: with a focus on women's health and reproductive rights. None of these women are/were fooled by the aims of the religious right, but if you believe that anyone has the power to frame their opponent's argument, turn it off, or make it stop, then you are simply naive.

Blaming those who laid the groundwork to insure women's health care and autonomy while enduring death threats, assault, harassment, and economic discrimination is hateful and untrue. You may think you are offering up something useable here, but you haven't suggested anything that hasn't been said or done already. If you ever joined the fight yourself, or survived an illegal abortion, you would have a different take. It's easy to be a keyboard critic; it's hard to support women in need.

Describing our sisters who have sacrificed so much as "Playing fat, dumb, and happy" is provocative and insulting. But, at least you had your say in a public forum, and we know where you stand on the issue.