Last August was the low point of the fortunes of President Obama and the Democrats.
I say this with scientific precision, based on two things. One: A friend of mine, who for years has been a loyal foot soldier in the local Democratic Party, suddenly wrote on her Facebook page that the party had better never call her again. For anything. Two: The same week, at a meeting of my quilting group, I heard myself say I didn’t care if Romney became the next president—he’d apparently been an OK governor of Massachusetts, and, really, could he be worse than Obama? Several of my impeccably leftist quilter friends sadly agreed.
It’s hard now to reconstruct the exact causes of our alienation. It had to do, I seem to recall, with the administration looking as if it might approve the Keystone pipeline, and with the White House’s general helplessness in dealing with one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional Congresses in U.S. history. We were bummed, and reasonably so.
But that was the summer of our discontent, and this is the spring of our renewed loyalty. Any thought of sitting out the election fight is so over, because of one stunningly obtuse GOP move: Once Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail started bashing Planned Parenthood and gassing about restricting contraception, everything crystallized. Obama is totally our guy! The Right—under any name, behind any face—is absolutely the enemy! Sell me a bumper sticker, and sign me up for the phone banks! Every woman I know feels pretty much the same way.
Polls last month showed that female support for the president is up by nearly 20 points since last fall. And the numbers don’t come close to conveying the fervor that’s been awakened—the emotion that’s running in the female electorate. You know all the chat about how the Democrats lacked passion, and needed a base as worked up and united as the evangelicals? Voilá—girls! Girls who’ve heard nice young women called sluts by the likes of Rush Limbaugh! All the president has to do to be our guy forever is to not go out and attack women’s hard-won reproductive rights—which we know Michelle would never let him do anyway, even if he wanted to. The opposition has handed him an astonishing gift.
It might be mysterious to some men why this simple yahoo-bait issue has turned out to be such a hornets’ nest. Allow me to explain: Tens of millions of American women love birth control and love Planned Parenthood. We love it not on ideological grounds, nor for abstract reasons, but because PP has helped us—and our mothers, our sisters, our daughters and our friends—when we most needed help, and with the most-important things in life.
My drama-free story is typical. I went to Planned Parenthood in Phoenix when I was 17 and had started sleeping with my boyfriend. I was treated kindly, professionally and affordably—the pill cost me $1 a month. To this day, I consider PP to have been a sort of founding partner in the happiest and most-successful aspect of my life: I have been pregnant once, and had my wonderful son when I was 26, married, in perfect health and longing for a baby. Every mother and child should be as lucky.
It has been otherwise for most women and children through much of history—a brutal fact that’s apparently been easy to overlook or romanticize in the last few decades. Since so much seems to have been forgotten or maliciously distorted, here are just a few background tidbits: The mother of PP founder Margaret Sanger (who, by the way, retired to Tucson in the 1940s) was pregnant 18 times—producing 11 live children—in 22 years, before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. As a nurse in the slums of New York in the 1910s, Sanger saw much suffering that was the direct result of “chronic pregnancy” during an era when it was illegal for doctors even to discuss birth control with their patients. Further, Sanger was motivated in her battle to supply women with birth control in large part because of her fervent desire to put an end to abortion.
Now that a generation of women is awake to the threat of losing what Sanger and so many others fought for, anything can happen. Because this matters to us. It matters very much.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2012.
Everyone has their own agenda and why they vote the way they do,even if its only one item.The problem is obongo has been screwing up on a lot more than social subjects and many people don’t give a hoot about them.Most young people don’t even know who the vice-president is?!
Like you, I had a great early experience with Planned Parenthood, and I was a boy who went there with his girlfriend. They were so wonderful. Of course back in those days, among Planned Parenthood’s biggest supporters was the Bush family, along with other mainstream Republicans.
Planned Parenthood’s head of fundraising at one time was Sen. Prescott Bush; he and Dorothy Walker Bush were its biggest donors in Connecticut and friends of Estelle Griswold, the woman whose legal challenge to the state’s ban on contraception later persuaded the Supreme Court to enshrine the right of sexual privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and thus laid the foundation for Roe v. Wade.
Planned Parenthood, when I was growing up in New York, was like the League of Women Voters, and I was grateful they had the funding to help two kids find safe and affordable birth control. It never occurred to me that one day it would be under the threat and the demonization of today’s Republicans. But of course at that time the Republican candidates I worked for when I was a teenager, like NYC Mayor John Lindsay, were sensible liberals, not crazy people like many (not all) of today’s Republicans.
You know Ann Romney’s $150 donation to Planned Parenthood in the 1990s probably reflected her true views. Too bad the Republicans want to write off the votes of women like her, who will definitely vote Democratic now.
No matter how you state it abortion(killing babies) is still murder. Go ahead and play, but don’t take it out on the innocents. And why should I have to pay for you to play? God fearing people will have to consider this. This is not, as some have stated a ‘secularist’ society.
Thanks so much for helping to give voice to the MAJORITY of Americans who use, appreciate, and love birth control. The attack on contraception coming from the right is just unbelievable!
Its not about killing babies its not about the sanctity of life MGarcia they really just want an unlimited number of starving desperate bodies to send to unlimited wars and we are the host organisms.
Bravo Renee! I love this article and have shared with friends. I too have renewed belief in Obama, the man, because he is a true humanitarian and can only control what his waffling Congress will permit. He is not afraid to speak out FOR you and me and others who also are suppressed by those who feel better controlling our lives. OBAMA 2012!
Ah, the saintly Planned Parenthood has many fans, no doubt. But, over the years, St. Elizabeth Clinic has done far more for me and my son when he was a child. I am thinking of serious bout with valley fever, and pnumonia …I can never spell that. We were turned away from …I made 50 bucks too much a month for ACCESS and he was a very sick little boy. I shudder to think of St. Elizabeth’s closing up in favor of PP. The latter does nothing for pediatric health or ongoing wellness, such as diabetes or skin cancer like they do.