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I wrote about this on Saturday, but today is the 20th anniversary of Canada’s biggest abortion-related Supreme Court case. For a super-comprehensive and fully informative take on Canada’s reproductive rights issues, I direct you to mattbastard. (Really, go — his post is awesome, and you will learn a lot).

Congrats, Canada, and here’s to 20 more years of progress.

Today, Canadians celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision, which struck down Canada’s anti-abortion laws and ended the prosecution of Dr. Henry Morgentaler. And there’s a lot to celebrate — including Dr. Morgentaler himself, who is a pretty impressive man.

Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who earned his medical training in Germany after being released from Auschwitz, came to Canada after med school graduation (he opposed Zionism and turned down a chance to live in Israel). He worked as a general practitioner in Canada, and began to see the damage illegal abortion did to women — and so he advocated for changing the laws, and began performing illegal abortions himself. Morgentaler eventually opened Canada’s first abortion clinic. He was arrested in 1970, tried, but acquitted by a jury. The acquittal was overturned, so he appealed, and was acquitted again. He was tried again in 1983, and this time the case went up to Canada’s Supreme Court. The Court held that the law under which Morgentaler was convicted was unconstitutional, ending most statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada.

Morgentaler was the victim of anti-choice terrorism in 1992, when his Toronto clinic was bombed. He wasn’t hurt. He won another Supreme Court case in 1993, this one about abortion regulations in the provinces. And he is currently working on opening two abortion clinics in the Canadian Arctic, in order to increase access to abortion services for women who live there. The slogan of his Ontario clinic is “Every Mother a Willing Mother, Every Child a Wanted Child.”

But, just as is the case with their neighbors to the south, Canada is in less-than-perfect shape when it comes to abortion rights. Their problems, though, are different from ours, as is their justification for abortion rights. Just check out what their Supreme Court said about abortion:

As the late Madam Justice Bertha Wilson wrote in the judgment, a woman has a right to continue or terminate a pregnancy, free of state interference.

No law is necessary because no law can do justice to this deeply personal decision.

“It is not just a medical decision,” Judge Wilson wrote. “It is a profound social and ethical one as well. It asserts that a woman’s capacity to reproduce is to be subject not to her control, but to that of the state.”

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I am officially exhausted. I’ve pretty much spent all day (and most of last night) scouring the internets for good pro-choice articles and blog posts (plus writing my own). A lot of what I’ve found is up at Alternet — I hope you’ll check it out, because there is a wealth of pro-choice goodness (more than a dozen articles and a few blog posts to top it off). I swear I’m not just blog-whoring — the stuff at Alternet is actually very, very good, and it’s a great round-up of what’s being said today. And don’t forget to sign up for the Reproductive Justice and Gender weekly newsletter that I’ll be sending out — sign-up is in the upper right-hand corner of the section. If you don’t live in the United States, just enter NONUS in the zipcode box.

Since Alternet only has permissions to reproduce posts from certain blogs,* I wasn’t able to grab nearly all of the fabulous blog posts that are up today — but I was lucky enough to get some of the best. Jessica highlights some more pro-choice blogging here, and NARAL Pro-Choice America has the full list of pro-choice bloggers here.

What were your favorite pro-choice posts and articles today? And as always, feel free to shamelessly self-promote in the comments.

And now it is finally time for me to pass out, after spending approximately 27 hours in front of my computer. I can no longer see straight, and if I have to italicize the word “Roe” one more time, I might throw my adorable little MacBook across the room. (Which would be sad, because, you know, it’s adorable and generally very kind to me). Don’t worry, though — I did make the time to have a glass of red wine (or two) in honor of Roe. And I am never again putting that word in proper italics.

Goodnight, and happy Roe day!

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*If you regularly blog about reproductive justice and would like to see your stuff re-printed at Alternet, I’m always looking for submissions. Email me at jill@alternet.org with your name, your blog, a short bio and permission to use your stuff and I’ll add you to the list of blogs I draw from. Also feel free to forward on particular blog posts of yours that you think are pertinent. I can’t promise that I’ll always use them, but I’ll do my best.

There’s lots being written about repro rights today. As a shameless self-promoter, I’ll suggest Alternet’s Reproductive Justice and Gender special coverage section – I’ve been scouring the internets for some of the best commentary and news on repro justice, and it’ll be going up throughout the day (something new will be posted every hour or two, and blog posts will start up this afternoon).

There’s also Bush v. Choice, where Jessica is putting up all of the Blogging for Choice posts as the day goes on.

And finally, the Huffington Post is doing a great job at getting many of our pro-choice leaders to post commentary.

Enjoy!

Also up at the Huffington Post.

35 years after Roe v. Wade solidified American womens’ right to abortion, reproductive rights remain in limbo. And while abortion rights are crucial to women’s health and autonomy, they are hardly the end-all be-all to reproductive justice — even if the constant attacks on those rights (and on the people who provide women with them) have forced the pro-choice movement to remain on the defensive about abortion in particular.

Roe at 35 is in bad shape. But there are plenty of forward-looking, positive steps to be taken. It’s worth raising a glass to Roe today — but even more importantly, it’s time to get out and fight. Here are a few reasons why:

10. Abortion is already inaccessible and out of reach for many women.
Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider. Parental consent laws, 24-hour waiting periods, and other anti-choice roadblocks make abortion difficult or impossible for many women — young women and low-income women in particular. The Hyde Amendment blocks federal Medicaid money from paying for abortion, meaning that low-income women have their medical care determined by anti-choice bureaucrats instead of doctors. When women have to spend weeks trying to legally bypass parental consent laws, or when they have to take time off work, save up money for the procedure, find someone to take care of their children, figure out transportation, and drive miles and miles to the closest clinic only to be told to “go home and think about it and come back tomorrow,” the procedure gets pushed back — and later-term abortions are more difficult and more expensive. An abortion at 24 weeks (a procedure already impossible to get in most states) can cost as much as $10,000. Groups like the National Abortion Network of Abortion Funds and the Haven Coalition attempt to offset the costs of abortion and the related expenses, but their budgets and abilities are limited, particularly in contrast to the financial and political strength of the anti-choice movement. In the meantime, Roe remains an unfulfilled promise for many American women.
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And remember that it’s Blog for Choice day too. My post will be up in a few hours.

The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

…

There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

—Lucinda Cisler (1969): Abortion law repeal (sort of): a warning to women

To-day is the 35th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, the jubilee day on which abortion laws were repealed in every state of the United States, and the United States judiciary recognized, finally, even if in a limited and limiting way, every woman’s fundamental human right to control her own body, and to exercise her rightful self-ownership, if she sees fit, to refuse the use of her reproductive organs to Man, Fetus, and State. There’s a lot not to like about the specifics of the reasoning in Roe, and it’s often frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’ve got to celebrate, or at least defend. But if nothing else, it is worth celebrating the pro-choice feminist movement that made Roe inevitable, and which won Roe for the capstone of a remarkable, explosive struggle, over the course of just under 4 years, from the decisive beginning of the pro-choice feminist movement in early 1969, to the Supreme Court decision in January 1973. (There was a small, barely effectual abortion law reform movement before 1969; but February and March 1969 marked the beginning of the abortion law repeal movement, and also the beginning of the pro-choice argument — that is, early 1969 is when the argument shifted from the old tack of getting people to feel sorry for the poor desperate girl, to the new demand by radicalized women for their right to the determine how their own bodies will or will not be used.) The repeal movement exploded basically out of nowhere, at a time when abortion was criminalized in every one of the 50 states. Led by a coalition of radical Women’s Liberationists and radicalized ordinary women, the new movement quickly shoved aside the male experts, both reactionary and reformist, who had dominated the discourse for decades beforehand, threw out the request for piecemeal reforms (of the rape-incest-health of the mother variety), demanded instead the complete repeal of all abortion laws, and then won, first with the New York state repeal in 1971, and then with the nation-wide repeal in January 1973. That’s something to remember, and to celebrate.

Men don’t get pregnant, men don’t bear children. Men just make laws.

—Redstockings demonstrator, at a New York legislative hearing on abortion laws, 13 February 1969

Like all anniversaries, this is a good day for remembering, and for honoring. One of the things I think it is most important to remember on this day, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the way in which the occasion is attached to a legal ruling handed down by nine men in black robes, is a matter of strategy. It is all too easy to make the latest political cockfight out as the be-all and end-all of pro-choice activism; to realize, correctly, that the legal position of abortion rights is really precarious and to leap, incorrectly, to the conclusion that if Roe falls, that will be the end of it. No it won’t. The pro-life State had its guns trained on us before, and we beat it. If it turns its guns on us again, that will be terrible, but we will beat it again nevertheless. Perhaps by once again forcing the hand of state legislators or the courts. Or perhaps not. There are other ways to get it done. Here is how a group of women in Chicago took matters into their own hands, years before Roe, without the blessing of the male experts and in defiance of the man-made Law, in order to make justice for their sisters a reality.

Radical women in Chicago poured their energy into Jane, an abortion referral service initiated by Heather Booth, who had been a one-woman grapevine for her college classmates. In 1971, after Booth’s departure, some of the women took matters into their own hands and secretly began to perform the abortions themselves. Safe, compassionate terminations for a modest fee became their high calling—a model, as they saw it, for women’s empowerment after the revolution.

Leaflets appeared in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the University of Chicago bearing a simple message: Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane at 643-3844. The number rang at the home of one of the activists who volunteered to be Jane. As word spread and the volume of calls increased, the service acquired its own phone line and an answering machine, a cumbersome reel-to-reel device that was one of the first on the market. Volunteers, known inside the service as call-back Janes, visited the abortion seekers to elicit crucial medical details (most important was lmp, the number of weeks since the last menstrual period), then another level of volunteers scheduled an appointment with one of the abortionists on the group’s list.

At first the service relied on Mike in Cicero, who was fast, efficient, and willing to lower his price to five hundred dollars as the volume increased. Mike gradually let down his guard with Jody Parsons, his principal Jane contact, an artisan who sold her beaded jewelry and ceramics at street fairs and was a survivor of Hodgkin’s disease. The clandestine abortionist and the hippy artisan struck up a bond. When Mike confessed that he was not in fact a real doctor but merely a trained technician, she cajoled him into teaching her his skills. Jody’s rapid success in learning to maneuver the dilating clamps, curettes, and forceps demystified the forbidden procedures for another half dozen women in Jane. If he can do it, then we can do it became their motto.

Madeline Schwenk, a banker’s daughter who had married at twenty, six months pregnant with no clue whatsoever about how to get an abortion, moved from counseling to vacuum aspiration after Harvey Karman, the controversial director of a California clinic, came to Chicago to demonstrate his technique. Madeline was one of the few women in Jane who was active in NOW, and who stayed affiliated with the Chicago chapter during the year she wielded her cannula and curette for the service. I’d get up in the morning, make breakfast for my three kids, go off to do the abortions, then go home to make dinner, she reminisces. Pretty ourageous behavior when you think about it. But exciting.

Jane’s abortion practitioners and their assistants were able to handle a total of thirty cases a day at affordable fees—under one hundred dollars. A doctor and a pharmacist among the women’s contacts kept them supplied with antibiotics.

Fear of police surveillance in radical circles had its match among clandestine abortionists who relied on a complicated rigamarole of blindfolds and middlemen. Jane straddled both worlds. Abortion seekers gathered every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at a front apartment, usually the home of a Jane member or friend, and were escorted by Jane drivers to the Place, a rented apartment where the abortions were performed. The fronts and the Place changed on a regular basis. New volunteers, brought into the group by counselors and drivers, went through a probation period before they were told that women in Jane were doing the abortions. The news did not sit well with everyone. Turnover was high, from fear and from burnout, although the service usually maintained its regular complement of thirty members.

Jane lost most of its middle-class clientele after the New York law [repealing the state’s abortion ban] went into effect. Increasingly it began to service South Side women, poor and black, who did not have the money to travel out of state, and whose health problems, from high blood pressure to obesity, were daunting. Pressure on the providers intensified. Audaciously they added second-trimester abortionsby induced miscarriage to their skills.

On May 3, 1972, near the conclusion of a busy work day in an eleventh-floor apartment on South Shore Drive overlooking Lake Michigan, Jane got busted. Seven women, including Madeline Schwenk, were arrested and bailed out the following day. The Chicago Daily News blared Women Seized in Cut-Rate Clinic in a front-page banner. The Tribune buried Lib Groups Linked to Abortions on an inside page. Six weeks later the service was back in buinsess. Wisely, the women facing criminal charges selected a defense attorney who was clued in to and optimistic about the national picture. She advised them to hang tight—some interesting developments were taking place in Washington that could help their case. (After the January 1973 Roe decision, all outstanding charges against the seven were dropped.)

The activists of Jane believe they performed more than ten thousand abortions. It’s a ballpark figure based on the number of procedures they remember doing in a given week. For security reasons they did not keep records.

—Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, pp. 123—125

The repeal of the abortion laws in the United States wasn’t a gift handed down out of benevolence by a gang of old men in robes. It was struggled for, and won, by women in our own times. It didn’t take ballot boxes; it didn’t take political parties; it didn’t take clever legal briefs. It took radical women who stood up for themselves, who challenged the authority of self-appointed male experts and law-makers, who spoke truth to power, who took things into their own hands and helped their sisters, in defiance of the law, because they knew that they had a right to do it, and to hell with any law and any government that said otherwise. Radical feminists who built a movement for their own freedom over a matter of months and decisively changed the world in less than five years. It’s not just that we owe the Redstockings, Cindy Cisler, Heather Booth, Jody Parsons, Madeline Schwenk, and so many others our praise. They do deserve our cheers, but they also deserve our study and our emulation. They did amazing things, and we — feminists, leftists, anti-statists — owe it not only to them, but to ourselves, to honor them by trying to learn from their example.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-01-22: Happy birthday to Roe!
• GT 2005-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #32
• GT 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33
• GT 2006-03-08: Abortion on demand and without apology (Dakota Remix)
• GT 2007-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #34

We’re getting a bit more traffic in the post-YearlyKos blog-frenzy, so now is probably a good time to put up some decent posts. Unfortunately, I’m totally crazed right now — finishing my last week of work, moving, and then leaving for Hamburg/Italy/Hamburg again in less than a week. Which means that my ability to write decent posts is close to nil. Plus I’m 3/4 of the way through a bottle of Pinot Noir (it’s my one night to relax, ok?) and we all know that Posting Under the Influence is a poor choice. Luckily, another project I’m working on has me browsing our archives, and I’m thinking that this week might be a good time to re-play our Greatest Hits. We’ll begin with a post that I feel very good about from January, on the eve of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade: Why I’m Pro-Choice.
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...it's time to push back the regressive forces in Congress. Support the Freedom of Choice Act.

Step 1:
Join NARAL Pro-Choice America in our National Call-In Day to Support the Freedom of Choice Act
- Wednesday, April 25
- Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to both of your senators and your representative
- Use the following script:
“Please cosponsor the Freedom of Choice Act (H.R.1964/S.1173) to codify Roe v. Wade and guarantee the right to choose for future generations of women.”
- Click on the link [on the page linked above] to find out what other organizations are participating.

Step 2:
Fill out the form [on the page linked above] to urge your members of Congress to sign on as cosponsors, and then forward this action to your friends.

Who's involved?

NARAL Pro-Choice America is co-sponsoring the national call-in day with the following coalition partners:
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Advocates for Youth
Alliance for Justice
American Association of University Women
American Civil Liberties Union
Catholics for a Free Choice
Center for American Progress Action Fund
Choice USA
Feminist Majority Foundation
Law Students for Choice
Medical Students for Choice
National Abortion Federation
National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Women’s Organizations
National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association
National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
National Organization for Women
National Women’s Law Center
People for the American Way
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Reproductive Health Technologies Project
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States
Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective

The pro-choice community is working to guarantee the right to choose through the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). 

• FOCA will restore the reproductive rights recognized under the vision expressed in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, before anti-choice legislators and courts chipped away at these rights. 
• FOCA will secure the right to choose by establishing a federal law that will guarantee reproductive freedom for future generations of American women.  This guarantee will protect women’s rights even if President Bush and his allies are successful in reversing Roe v. Wade or imposing even more restrictions on our right to choose.

Click here to learn more about President Bush's Federal Abortion Ban and the Supreme Court's recent decision.

This is going to be a long battle in the war to establish and defend women's rights. I'm under no illusion that the current Congress, what with forced-pregnancy advocates sitting on both sides of the aisle, will pass this legislation, but showing support is a first step towards getting our elected officials to realize that the vast majority of Americans don't want the government controlling family planning.

Russell Shaw calls for progressives to unite around whatever Democratic Party nominee for president:

I look at this past week's 5-4 Supreme Court vote against "partial birth abortion." Then I hold up the ages of liberal Justices John Paul Stevens (87), and an increasingly feeble Ruth Bader Ginsburg (74) against the actuarial tables.

I just pray these two are able to serve on the Court until that hopefully blessed morning of January 20, 2009.

At Noon on that day, a Democrat will- from my mouse to the Goddess' ears- take the Oath.

I'd love for the oath-taker to be Al Gore, or John Edwards, or Bill Richardson. But if it comes down to saving Roe, I'd settle for Hillary. With more campaign funds than her Democratic opponents, her nomination is likely. I can see where Obama will fade, Edwards may need to drop out, and Gore will stay out.

At this point in time, though, I can see a scenario that causes ideological purists on our side of the fence to do something stupid that will cause Hillary to fall short, and thus, pave the path for another anti-choice, Justice-appointng [sic] Republican to get into the White House.

Despite the fact that Russell Shaw is echoing radical right-wing (as well as Markos Moulitsas) talking points about "ideological purity" -- a Rovian expression if I ever heard one -- I can see his point. Just this morning, I was thinking about how any of the top four -- Obama, Edwards, Richardson or even Clinton -- would get my vote. And while I know not nearly enough to choose any one above the others, at this point, my sense is that one of them would suffice for me come November next year.

Making that decision so much easier is the fact that the Republicans have so far offered up boobs, bigots and bobbies. Given the radical and, yes, misogynist and, yes again, racist and, yes, obviously, homophobic values at the core of the right wing, I don't see myself voting for any Republican for president any time soon. Add in their modern penchant for fascistic governmental control over individuals -- making the phrase "the party of Goldwater" an oxymoronic joke -- and I don't see myself voting Republican in my lifetime.

However, Congress is a different matter. Do we continue to vote for pro-forced-pregnancy Democrats? How do we, as progressives, in good conscience cast our lot with men (yes once more, I'm afraid) who consider women's right to privacy to be non-existent, women's medical choices to be controlled by politicians, women's health to be a distraction, women's lives to be important only when not distracting from other interests, and women's bodies to be, ultimately, Property of the U.S. Government?

I wonder how many Democratic and independent voters even realize that their Democratic Senator(s) and/or Representative is an advocate of forced pregnancy.

The question is pertinent right now, pre-primaries, while we look at what kind of future we want to forge in the can't-come-soon-enough post-Bush America. Now is the time to ask the questions. Now is the time to choose. Now is the time to push for the progressives that will defend privacy and equal rights and civil rights and human rights for everyone, not just the ruling men who look upon the rest of us as "peasants."

It's not an easy thing, when the Democratic Party, whose vague favoring of progressive values stands out like a monument to all things noble and just when compared with the venal depravity that describes the power centers of the GOP, has such a slim and weak hold upon Congress.

It's all the more difficult when you consider that men claiming progressive values have historically dismissed our alarms about the Handmaid trends happening in our politics -- our politics. And it sure as heck doesn't help that ignorance and willful ignorance on the part of ostensibly well-intentioned men when it comes to issues women face continue.

The demographics are with us, though. More GOP seats in the Senate are up for election next year. Americans in general are suspicious of an overly invasive Government. And, while meaningful statistics are lacking (at least from what I can tell), based on anecdotal evidence there are quite a number of so-called "pro-life" Americans who oppose abortion until the issue comes home to roost in their own families, in their own lives.

So what's it going to be, boys? When you throw women's lives into the mix, does women's equality count as "important shit"?