October 22, 1912

If Bunny were still here, we’d be having some pretty lively political discourse about now.  I’m a lifelong Democrat (shocking, I know), and Bunny claimed to be Independent, but leaned Republican.  He actually picked out Mitt Romney a few years ago and predicted he’d be the next Republican Presidential candidate, so he’d be especially pleased with himself for having “discovered” Romney.  Anytime he spotted someone before the majority of the world took note of that person (Britney Spears being his best example), he bragged that he had discovered that person.

My belief in social programs was too “bleeding heart” for my husband’s tastes.  Likewise, his adherence to capitalism appalled me.  We had different views on abortion, too: I advocated for choice, and he had a limited acceptance of it.  His viewpoint came from a strictly personal perspective: he was adopted, and by his reasoning, if abortion had been legal, he might not have been here.  I pointed out that abortion was around long before it was illegalized, and that his birth mother could have chosen that route if she’d wanted to.  Even though he didn't like the idea of abortion, he didn’t believe that fetuses should have rights bestowed upon them, or that rape victims should be forced to bear their attackers' babies.  In other words, he accepted legalized abortion as a necessary evil, and believed that the choice of whether to have one should rest with the woman doing the deciding.   

I’ve voted in every Presidential Election since I was 18, but this is the first time that I’m actually afraid of the outcome if my candidate loses.  Though Paul Ryan dismisses the idea that there is a war on women, I don’t know of a better descriptor: women are facing the very real risk of losing rights that were hard-won: the right to equal pay for equal work, and the right to control decisions about what happens to their bodies.  

The Republican Party’s platform this time around is the most conservative I can remember.  Maybe it’s come close before, but there weren’t Republican congressMEN spouting falsehoods like “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” (Todd Akin) and “[w]ith modern technology and science, you can't find one instance" of a pregnant woman's life being at risk (Joe Walsh).  Science and statistics abound to prove both statements absolutely false.   Bunny would have been the first to blast these statements and the men who made them.

You might blame their ignorance the fact that they’re not doctors, but then I think back to when Bill Frist, a Republican heart surgeon turned Senator, took a leading role in the Terri Schiavo case.  He used his medical degree to lend credibility to his incorrect opinion that Ms. Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state.  

The Schiavo case also had Bunny and me on opposite ends of the spectrum: I was firmly in the right-to-die camp, and he was on the “preserve life at all costs, no matter what the quality” side.  I drafted and signed my living will before Terri died.  Bunny wouldn’t even consider looking at one.  He was two years into his cancer diagnosis before he changed his mind.   Once he did, he was the biggest advocate for quality over quantity of life that you could find. 

Of all things, an article I read last week about slang terms from the 1920s got me thinking about all the strides we, as a society, have made in the past 100 years, and how much we have to lose.  For example, my grandmother, Betty Gray, was born in 1912, the fourth of 10 children.  On October 22^nd, exactly a century ago, Grandma was four and a half months old.  Her mother, Una (or Grandma Gray, as we called her), was 26; Grandma Gray would have three more babies before women in the United States were given the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920).  

It would be another year before Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which was one of the early entities that would later merge to form Planned Parenthood.  At the time, it was illegal to distribute information about birth control (thanks to the Comstock law).  Sanger would do jail time before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the portion of the law that led to her arrest. 

It wouldn’t be until the mid-sixties—after my sisters and I were born—that the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited birth control by married couples, on the grounds that it invaded the Constitutional right to privacy. (For my lawyer friends, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).)  I remember this case from law school (thanks, Professor Mayton) because it was the first time I’d heard the word “penumbra.”  I was ten years old before the Court held that the privacy right extended to unmarried people, as well.  Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

A year later, the Court decided Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113 (1973)).  It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine, surf the ‘net, or watch the news for any length of time nowdays without seeing or hearing mention of this case.  How many people know, though, what the case really says?  If your understanding of the case comes from listening to politicians, you might think that the Roe Court threw open wide the doors to abortion clinics and encouraged all the women in America to get pregnant with abandon. 

First, the Court was not cavalier in Roe, by any means.  It went on for paragraphs about the gravity of the subject matter, and accounted for the various positions that are every bit as relevant today as they were then.   The Roe case challenged a Texas law made it illegal to procure or assist a woman in getting an abortion, unless her life was endangered by the pregnancy. 

Before 1854, abortion in Texas was not a crime; it wasn’t in the majority of the other states, either.  The Court recounted the history of abortion in the Roe decision, and there are some rather fascinating bits of information in the historical section.  In one of the first paragraphs of that section, the Court noted that U.S. laws criminalizing abortion didn’t start appearing until the latter half of the 19th century.  The idea that the fetus had a soul from the moment of conception was not originated by the Catholic church, or by any Christian sect—it sprang from Pythagorean philosophy (yes, that Pythagoras--the math guy), and was the minority opinion in ancient Greece. 

Actually, even the early Christians and the Catholic church didn’t spout the “moment of conception” view until the 19^th century.  Before that, cannon law and Christian theology put the soul forming at 40 days in a male and 80 in a female.  Until the 1800s, abortion in the U.S. was legal, up to the point of quickening (when the woman feels the fetus moving—usually around 16 to 18 weeks).

In America, after the Civil War, various states began passing laws increasingly restricting abortion.  Finally, by the end of the 1950s, abortion was virtually outlawed by a majority of the states.  However, even then, there remained exceptions to save or preserve the woman’s life.  As the Court noted, “…at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today.”

At the end of the day, the Court struck down the Texas law and legalized abortion for any reason, up through the first trimester.  In other words, Roe v. Wade didn’t give women rights they’d never had—it restored rights that had been taken away by laws passed after the Civil War. 

The Republicans of 2012—those of the Akin and Walsh and Ryan ilk—would take away those restored rights, plus strip women of the right to terminate pregnancies that endanger their lives.  That’s what makes me so fearful: I can’t imagine a party that wants to put women into an even worse position than they were in on October 22, 1912. Even with his objections to abortion, I know Bunny wouldn’t want to see that happen, either.