Marching For Women’s Lives

If you’re not going, chances are you know someone who is. Hell, my mom is flying out all the way from Berkeley. This Sunday, Washington, D.C. will be the place to be, when hundreds of thousands of women (and men) converge upon the city for the much anticipated “March for Women’s Lives.”

A march of this magnitude, rare even by DC standards, means something’s up. Indeed, the event is fueled by a palpable sense of urgency. The Bush Administration has laid siege to women’s reproductive rights here at home, and it is sacrificing women’s lives abroad in the name of political expediency.

The most contentious issue, of course, is abortion. Congress recently passed the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” a law that effectively grants fetuses the legal status of persons. At issue is clearly not the protection of pregnant women—an otherwise identical bill that dropped the-fetus-as-person language was shot down. Even many pro-life supporters unapologetically admit that the law is intended to lay the groundwork for a future legal challenge to Roe.

But the march is about more than just abortion. Another hot button issue is emergency contraception, a shameful example of science subordinated to politics. Despite the full approval of two FDA scientific advisory panels, the agency is bowing to pressure from conservative groups and stonewalling efforts to allow a new brand of emergency contraception to be made available over-the-counter. A possible FDA ‘compromise’ recently floated in the press would single out teenage girls, prohibiting them from buying the drug without a prescription. This is nonsense; if anything, teens have more to gain from over-the-counter access than do older women who enjoy easier access to prescriptions. Even the New England Journal of Medicine has jumped into the debate, asserting that teenage use was explicitly approved by the advisory panels and that there is no scientifically valid reason to limit access.

Foreign delegations, many from developing countries, will also march this Sunday. Seem strange? It’s not. Harmful conditions on American foreign aid are killing thousands of women around the world. According to Ellie Smeal, president of the group Feminist Majority which is cosponsoring the march, “We used to say, ‘if we lose (abortion rights) women will die.’ You will not hear that at this march. You will hear, ‘women are dying, are being injured, because it is now driven home how devastating these policies are.’”

Thanks to the Global Gag Rule, a pernicious Reagan policy reinstated by the Bush Administration, foreign NGOs that use their own funds to perform abortions, offer abortion counseling or lobby for legalizing abortion in their countries are denied U.S. aid. The White House has blocked funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) —a key international family planning care provider—for two years running on charges that they finance abortion services in China. (UNFPA denies the charges and their story was recently corroborated by an independent delegation of experts.)

Then there is the whole abstinence debacle. In the face of an overwhelming public health consensus, the White House continues to fund “abstinence only” sex-ed programs throughout the U.S. More troubling is that precious millions from the President’s global AIDS budget have been earmarked for these programs abroad.

The Bush White House is often taken to task for being long on politics and short on policy. Indeed, even when the President does take a strong stance to protect women’s health, it’s in an effort to appease his base. A striking example is the case of international sex trafficking, a global blight that each year ensnares an estimated two to four million women and children and forces them into sexual servitude. For years, the U.S. government did little to confront the issue. But when evangelical Christians began voicing concerns the President was quick to listen, and strong new legislation soon followed.

I find this story heartening. President Bush doesn’t wish ill upon the women of the world, he just wants to get reelected. And there is nothing inherently wrong with a little responsiveness to the voters—we do live in a democracy after all. Which brings us back to Sunday’s march. Think of those million angry women as sending a friendly reminder to our nation’s leaders that they will be held accountable come November.

Sasha Post ’05 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.