The gender gap arisesTHE MARCH for Women's Lives that drew hundreds of thousands to the National Mall yesterday is just the beginning of President Bush's woman problem. As Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton reminded the massive crowd, millions of women who were eligible to vote did not cast a ballot for president in 2000. If the energy generated by yesterday's march -- aided by grassroots registration efforts such as America Coming Together -- can stir these disengaged women to the polls in November, the results of the 2004 election will not be close at all. Women who voted in 2000 chose Democrat Al Gore over president Bush by a ratio of 54 to 43 percent. Certainly a percentage of those who came to the pro-choice march yesterday -- the pierced and tatooed contingents who arrived by skateboard, for example -- are unlikely to do something so conventional as vote in November. But the majority of demonstrators appeared to be middle-aged suburbanites and their daughters, many of them first-time marchers who gave strikingly similar reasons for coming.
"I'm here because my parents always told me if I really believe in something I need to go all out for it." "I'm here because my daughter asked me to come." "Because I owe it to the next generation, and to past generations." "Because I didn't have choice when I was young." "Because it's been a long time since I bore witness to something I believe in." "Because it's time to put my words where my heart is." The marchers were galvanized by threats to reproductive rights, under seige as never before since the Supreme Court declared abortion legal in 1973. Francis Kissling, head of Catholics for a Free Choice, confronted the self-righteousness of the opposition by declaring the rally "a sacred space" and the distortions about reproductive science promoted by some abortion opponents "a sin." The administration's hostility to abortion is real, and rarely as clear as in its so-called Mexico City policy, which prevents health clinics receiving US foreign aid from even mentioning abortion as an option for pregnant women -- even if the pregnancy is the result of sexual abuse and even where abortion is legal. In those countries, losing American funds also can mean the end to safe childbirth, well-baby care and AIDS prevention.
But reproductive rights travel in a constellation of related issues. Current Bush administration policies also threaten women's economic security and social opportunity, whether it is erosion in Title IX guarantees to equal education, cutbacks in domestic violence prevention, or gaps in the safety net that affect women disproportionately simply because they are more likely to be poor. This is also about "women's lives," and be the tonic to rouse the sleeping majority. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
|
