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No response to ad insert
“Life is full of surprises!” I’m surprised that I haven’t heard a word or read any reader responses about the recent paid advertising insert (Nov. 15, 2001) with the same title from the Human Life Alliance, a group operating out of St. Paul that opposes abortion rights.
Why no discussion, outrage, debate or disagreement? Is it because no one noticed or read it? Is it because it was so ridiculous and one-sided that readers blew it off? Is it because most readers agree with the message outlined in the flashy publication? Or is it because caring about women’s right to abortion is passe, too controversial, or a social and political issue that can never be resolved?
I happen to fear the worst, and believe that two parallel circumstances are operating. One is that because, on the whole, political student activism has decreased in this country, fewer students are engaging in political organizing on issues such as abortion rights.
Second, support for abortion rights by the nation’s college freshmen has been decreasing for the last decade. According to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, support for keeping abortion legal has been decreasing since 1990. In 1990, 64.9 percent of incoming freshmen supported abortion rights, compared to a record low of 50.9 percent in 1998. Heartening to “pro-life” advocates, frightening to advocates of abortion rights. The reasons for decreasing support for abortion are evident.
First, in the years since abortion has been legal, there has emerged a population of people who have never met a woman who has had an illegal abortion or heard stories from nurses and doctors who treated women with botched, illegal abortions.
Second, abortion rights have been an entitlement (thankfully) for women under the age of 40. Many people have forgotten about the fight for safe, dignified, legal abortion waged by women in the 1960s and 70s.
Finally, the intimidation, scare tactics, harassment and violence by the so-called pro-life movement have been extremely effective in both silencing the majority of the public that believe that abortion should be a woman’s private decision, and sculpting a culture that defines “life” from a restrictive religious viewpoint, a viewpoint of abortion as evil, murder, and mass destruction. Over the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed the societal shift—from woman to embryo/fetus—with amazement and disappointment.
The bottom line is that there are differing views about the morality of abortion, consequently, abortion as an issue will never be “solved.”
Women have always had, and always will have, a need for abortions, and they will obtain them whether they are legal or not.
Claims made in the recent anti-abortion insert deserve a lengthy response, but barring that option I pose one question to the campus community: “Who decides?”
Jane Olsen
Women’s Center Director
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