Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has declared Jan. 22 — the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade — as “Protect Life Day.”
The opening line of his pandering proclamation is blatantly untrue. He states that the U.S. Supreme Court decision “legalized abortion for any reason for the full nine months of pregnancy in all of the United States.”
Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first trimester without restrictions; it limited regulation in the second trimester to protect the woman’s health and safety; and it gave the government the right to restrict or bar third trimester abortions.
Statistics show that about 87% of abortions take place in the first trimester, with 12% occurring after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only about 1.3% are performed after the 20th week. Late-term abortions are usually to save a pregnant woman’s life, such as when a woman discovers she is carrying a dead or brainless fetus.
Walker should retract and apologize to the citizens of Wisconsin for his shameful misstatement. Truth should matter, even to a fundamentalist.
We didn’t elect Walker “Fundamentalist in Chief.” He should keep his absurd Religious Right opinions to himself.
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We should be honoring, not casting aspersions, on this landmark decision for women’s rights. As Margaret Sanger noted so many years ago in her quest to bring contraception to women, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation would not exist were it not for the Religious Right’s war on reproductive freedom. My mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, had her eyes opened to the harm of religious sway over secular law when she founded the Wisconsin Committee to Legalize Abortion in 1968.
Tagging along with her as a junior and senior in high school, my eyes were also opened. Seeing the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda and hearing rooms crowded with nuns, priests and bussed-in Catholic schoolchildren invoking “God” and the bible in all their testimony, we realized that while there were many women’s groups chipping away at women’s oppression, none was going to the root of the problem: organized religion.
I still remember my own and my mother’s ecstatic joy when we first heard the news about Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, 1973. The brutal battle, state by state, to try to decriminalize abortion had been ended in one fell swoop. We didn’t know then how vicious and unrelenting the religion-fueled anti-choice movement would be, but here we are 40 years later, and Roe, while a bit battle-worn, is still the law of the land. My mother has written about the historic fight to overturn antiabortion laws in Wisconsin in her book, Abortion Is a Blessing.
Today, at 86, she is literally still answering the daily calls for the Women’s Medical Fund, the abortion-rights charity she co-founded (with other atheists such as professor Robert West) in the 1970s. This pure charity has helped pay for abortions for more than 20,000 Wisconsin women — indigent women who should qualify for medical assistance but who are denied the right to abortion due to the Religious Right lobby, which has cut off abortion funding in Wisconsin and in many states and federally under the Hyde Amendment.
Daily she takes calls from teenagers, rape victims, victims of domestic abuse, those with many children already, ill and homeless women, living in conditions few of us can imagine, who find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy and no place to turn.
We are winning the reproductive war. We see U.S. Catholic bishops defeated in their attempts to sabotage the contraceptive mandate and bishops overseas failing to stop state-funded contraception in the Philippines. But as we celebrate 40 years of freedom for women, we must redouble our efforts to end the religion-fostered cut-off of public assistance for indigent women needing abortion care in the U.S. These forgotten and disenfranchised women deserve the same right to constitutional privacy, to control their own bodies, as the more affluent.
Atheists do indeed start and run charities. Please read the Women’s Medical Fund’s letter of appeal to learn more about the need. I challenge everyone who is offended by Governor Walker’s proclamation, who has the means to do so, to fight back by making a charitable donation to the Women’s Medical Fund.
