The Last Abortion Clinic
Just as the Senate prepares to begin the confirmation process for staunchly anti-choice nominee Sam Alito, the PBS series Frontline aired a powerful and important documentary on the latest developments in the war over reproductive rights.
The segment, "The Last Abortion Clinic", was a sobering assessment for pro-choice advocates. Frontline charted the growing strength - and success - of the anti-choice movement in Mississippi from the 1973 Roe v Wade decision through the present day.
Constantly testing the "undue burden" standard introduced by the Supreme Court in its 1992 Casey ruling, Mississippi has enacted a series of restrictions on access to abortion. Starting with rigid parental consent rules, the state added steep new barriers to abortion access, including requirements that abortion doctors must have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Starting in 2006, facilities performing second and third trimester procedures must meet the same regulatory standards as full surgical hospitals, 36 pages of rules in all. As a result, the entire state of Mississippi, one of the poorest in the nation, now has only a single abortion clinic, the Jacksonboro Women's Health Clinic.
Last year, I wrote about the increasing success of the "Slippery Slope" strategy used by anti-choice forces to undermine reproductive rights. Federal measures like the Partial Birth Abortion Ban of 2003 (currently blocked in the courts) and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act tap into the revulsion over rare but viscerally gruesome medical procedures or circumstances to chip away at the consistent pro-choice consensus in the United States.
Now, the threat comes not only from the new Roberts Court, which may have the opportunity if not the votes to overturn Roe. The more likely threat to the reproductive rights of American women may instead come from new state laws that further curtail access by challenging both the "health exception" and the undue burden standard. (Alito, the lone appellate dissenter in Casey, has made it clear where he stands). The Court's decision in the upcoming Ayotte case from New Hampshire could well be all important.
For progressives of all stripes, the lessons of "The Last Abortion Clinic" are clear. While all eyes on the left are focused on the war over Roe, the anti-choice forces and their slippery slope strategy are winning most of the battles.
How do we get a progressive agenda done today?
The answer appears in your wallet. I imagine each of you have studied the union movement. The union movement has brought us the 40 hour work week and the minimum wage. The union movement had focused on the individual employers to get these benefits.
Today corporations have taken over the Republican party and even write the legislation that hurts ordinary people.
We need to form our own ad hoc union and instead of going on a work strike we need to go on a purchasing strike. We need to target some of the major contributors of money to the Republican party as they pull the levers of power and they have the most to lose and they can get the pressure every day instead of the officeholders that only run every 2, 4 and 6 years.
We need to go on strike against Walmart, Wendy's, Outback Steak House, Dominos Pizza, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Eckerd, CVS and Walgreens, GE and Exxon/Mobil.
We need to call these companies and thell them we have gone on strike against them until they get the RNC to hold a press conference announcing that they will accede to our demands of a TEN dollar an hour minimum wage, an unemployment insurance benefit that will last 1 year instead of 6 months, a real prescription drug benefit under Medicare of 80 percent coverage and no privatization of social security and increasing the social security payroll tax,removing the 88,000 dollar a year FICA taxable income limit, and vote by mail throughout the US with paper ballots and an independent civil service that registers people to vote and counts votes. We need this and more. You make the demands, you go on strike. You have the money and the Republican contributors either do as we want or they go broke under our purchasing strike.
http://www.hoflink.com/~dbaer/petitions.htm