I grew up under the Hollywoodland sign.
Eisenhower was my first president. We didn't own a TV, but we had an icebox, we 'watched' the radio and music was called "Popular."
We were War Babies, born at the end of WWII, now on Medicare and Social Security. Dick Clark dubbed us the first 'teenagers.' We invented Rock and Roll, we grew up in the decades of the greatest social change in history... and we are never getting old.
When my parents returned from the "Great War" there was no housing so we lived in a tin Quonset hut in Roger Young Village, later to become the Griffith Park Zoo and in the summer... it was not unlike living in a frying pan.
Barry Goldwater was the first president I voted for in the 1964 election. "In our hearts we knew he was right" and besides, my mother voted for him. She was a 'card carrying' member of the John Birch Society and believed Fluoridation to be a Communist plot long before Dr. Strangelove.
Like Forest Gump, I seemed to be the right age at the right (or wrong) time in history.
On a crisp November day, I sat on the dewy lawn of Orange Coast Junior College and silently wept when our president was assassinated, as I did on that perfect September morning watching the draconian plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan.
In 1965 I moved to New York. Cigarettes cost 25 cents a pack, there were no fax, answering or cash machines.
Lyndon B. Johnson announced the creation of Medicare and the sexual revolution began in earnest with the advent of the birth control pill...up to that point, we just had to keep an aspirin between our knees.
And so began the swinging turbulent 60s of which I don't remember much... because I was there. The women's "Lib" movement was born and we were all having sex with strangers and reading Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying." We hit the streets with banners and no bras.
We marched for civil rights and against the war. We saw Hendrix and Joplin and could tell you where we were when every single Beatles album came out.
I made $50 a week at my very first real job on Madison Avenue. It was the days of Mad Men. I wore hot pants and mini skirts to work, we drank booze and smoked Marlboro's and for the next 20 years, I was the "top 3% of women wage earners." And when I was making six figures, it was still less than men doing the same job, but we didn't seem to mind, because we were all making so much money and it seemed like it would never end.
In 1972 I got my first American Express card and never used it.
Roe v. Wade, making abortion legal, was about to be the law of the land. Helen Reddy on the radio was declaring, "I am woman hear me roar!"
In 1987 "Fatal Attraction" was a wakeup call to every man in America and in 1991 when Anita Hill was testifying against Long Dong Silver... the human resources department at my ad agency was giving sensitivity training to all the employees about sexual harassment, which of course was rampant. Any woman in business can give you book chapter and verse on that subject, but you didn't say anything if you wanted to keep or get a job, you daren't say a word lest you be branded with a Scarlet A, and Clarence Thomas now sits on the Supreme Court.
Which is why, what the Republicans are doing to us, trying to blast us back to the 50s, the 1850's, is just wrong! The idea of 'redefining rape' and overturning Roe v. Wade is just wrong. To have panels on contraception without one woman present is just wrong! When Sandra Fluke is called a "slut" is just wrong.
The Right is just... WRONG! One bit of schadenfreude, hearing repressed men having to say, "Vaginal probe, forcible rape and Free Pussy Riot!"
There will be no fewer abortions if they have their way, They will just drive it underground ...again.
More women of my generation need to speak up, women who were there who had back alley abortions, who were around before birth control. Women who experienced the agonizing decision to terminate a pregnancy before and after they had the choice to do so! I can't believe we are still talking about this; don't these interlopers know that we have already fought and won this battle?
"We are women hear us roar!" ...and we will remember in November.
I stood on the convention floor at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta when Governor Ann Richards declared, "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred did...only backwards... and in high heels."
New York City Women's Right's March 8/26/12
Sandi Bachom is the author of "Denial Is Not a River in Egypt," "Hell in the Hallway" and "The Wrath of Grapes."
Follow Sandi Bachom on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sandibachom
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 |
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| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
I think that the most important issue to me as a mother of girls is NOT if they can get birth control, abortions and exams - I feel quite sure NO POLITICAL PARTY will keep that right from women. AFTER ALL WE ARE THE STRONGER SEX - or at least that is what my Mother told me.
I fear that they will not be able to get a job. They will not live in a country where they and their families feel secure and hopeful. I fear that they will have not the spirit of strength, of self esteem and confidence in their own abilities.
Since then there has been a let Washington handle it attitude, that has helped get us into our predicament.
Could you please help me? I really want to know.
F & F
'My body my choice' and this sort of thing is, at worst, a calculated distraction, and at best, a ghastly display of poor reasoning: the issue at hand in our society is what is human life? Lots of people are inconvenient to my goals and aspirations but I'm not allowed to kill them.
Defining when we come into being is of the utmost importance, and should be to all of us, men and women. It speaks to the nature of our society.
Bioethics is very very sticky (what gives an organism rights? There is clearly more reason in a chimp than a newborn- is it the potential- or should we be bringing other animals under our umbrella?) and I am willing to have that discussion but it has nothing to do with whether or not the fetus is inconvenient or 'wanted.'
I know that thinking about the rights/autonomy of marginalized groups (the senile, disabled, animal rights, and yes, the fetus) can become dizzying and leave us with an ethic of, well just do what seems obvious- give rights to those who can talk or look like us and quietly take them from those who cannot talk or who do not look like us.
Who we judge to be endowed with rights and who we do not is, no matter how many times you say otherwise, a decision for our entire 'democratic republic,' not just half.
A developing fetus is autonomous in thought and movement. It is genetically distinct from it's mother. It does not even share mother's blood, only space inside her body. For the last 16 weeks of development, it has a very real chance at viability outside a woman's body (for 14 of those weeks, an excellent chance).
As most liberals willingly say, we are a community and must sacrifice for the common good. Yes, a developing fetus impinges on the rights of a mother. In a society, rights often overlap. If my rights overlap yours, you do not get to terminate me. Of course that maternal/fetal relationship is so much more complicated but non the less deserving of an examination of its rights.
I will speak to your factual arguments:
"A person is the sum of biology and sociology." I would like to hear what you mean by this. Expand?
"Personhood is a new concept, conceived in the republican War on Women...."
This is false. The idea of questioning who is a person, deserving of rights is an old concept.I am not interested in the political buzz words so I will ignore them- those phrases both on the right and left, are what people use when they don't actually want to think.
I will respond to one of your assumptions: that I obviously believe life begins at conception. I never said that and I am not sure I believe it. I do think it is the safest cut-off to make: 'conception' is less arbitrary than 'birth' but I am not certain where the line in the sand should be.
As to your whole pro-birther sentence. I have talked extensively about the rights of women who are carrying a fetus. I acknowledge these rights but your assumption (that a fetus is 'part of a woman's body.period- without any ability to see a different point of view) makes it impossible for you to see that a fetus may actually have rights and then seek to rectify the rights of the mother with those of the fetus.
We, however, have a President who not only believes in late-term abortion but as an Illinois state senator, voted against efforts to save babies born after bungled abortion attempts. He also appointed a late-term abortion advocate to head HHS. Neither seems to recognize any protection of the unborn.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZS.html
If you disagree with my post, you disagree with Roe v. Wade. Would you like to see it overturned?
Thank you very much for writing this.
How many woman died from back alley abortions? How many were rendered sterile? The sexual revolution was by far more about woman's health and freedom from only being a "housewife/slave". How many households could survive on 1 income because a woman couldn't get an education and a decent job because she had 5 children?
You really can't appreciate any of this unless you lived through all of those events. They shaped our country just like the Republicans greed almost brought down our country in 2008.
Wake up people.