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Stand and deliver
What’s changed — and what hasn’t — since I last marched for women’s right to choose
BY TAMARA WIEDER

We are not going backwards, child. Do you hear me? Never again, y’all. Never again.

— Whoopi Goldberg

NEVER AGAIN. I thought so, too. It’s been 15 years since I last sat in the back seat of a car winding its way back from a pro-choice march in Washington, DC. It was the fall of my senior year of high school, and I was tucked in the back of the family minivan, notepad in lap, pen in hand. College-application essays were nearly due; I’d spent weeks crafting countless drafts, only to discard them when their subjects grew maudlin, their direction muddy, their words meaningless. It was time, once more, to start over.

Never again. Who could have foreseen that a decade and a half later I’d be making the very same trip? It’s a Monday morning and I’m tucked in the back seat of a friend’s SUV, laptop balanced on my knees. My account of the March for Women’s Lives is due tomorrow, and so my second drive home from the capital will be devoted, once again, to sorting out my labyrinthine thoughts about the day — and trying, once again, to put words on paper.

PRESIDENT BUSH IS HAZARDOUS TO MY HEALTH

I certainly never expected to be here. Why would I have? When we left Washington in 1989, we were full of optimism. The march we’d made our pilgrimage for, the Mobilization for Women’s Lives, had drawn hundreds of thousands of people to the Capitol, signs and voices raised, to protect Roe v. Wade, whose existence we believed we’d shored up by our presence.

But I’m not thinking of 1989 now. I’m thinking of yesterday, of the million-plus marchers, signs and voices raised, who packed the mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument to protect Roe v. Wade, whose existence, today, is unfathomably but inarguably fragile. A single-vote shift in the Supreme Court — all but guaranteed if George W. Bush wins another term in November — will likely lead to the reversal of the landmark 1973 decision, which struck down a Texas law that made it a crime to perform an abortion unless a woman’s life was at stake. And a reversal of Roe v. Wade will allow states to block women’s access to safe and legal abortions; it is already known that 16 states will ban abortion in all or most circumstances if Roe v. Wade is overturned. This is what I’m thinking of now, as the rain slows our progress through Philadelphia — where, if time allowed, we could have stopped and read the inscription on the Liberty Bell: PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.

IGNORE YOUR RIGHTS — AND THEY’LL GO AWAY

We got complacent, many of us. In 1989, the elder President Bush was in office, and, after eight years of Reaganism, the pro-choice movement was very much on the defensive. We felt threatened, on the verge of a giant step backward. So we went to Washington. We spoke up. We voted. And in 1992, mere months after yet another march on Washington, we got our pro-choice president. Slowly, unconsciously, we relaxed. What was there, after all, to fight against?

In the streets of Washington, in 2004, we find ourselves fighting again. The anti-choice protesters, though small in number, are characteristically loud in message. They dress as grim reapers; they hold up crucifixes and graphic photos purported to be bloodied fetuses. They shout angry words into bullhorns and promise to pray for those who believe in women’s right to choose. The marchers, reportedly more than a million of us, clap and chant and dance past them through the streets. "There’s no talking about the issue with them," sighs one man in our midst, shaking his head at a woman on the other side of the barricade — the other side of an unbridgeable moral and spiritual chasm — tossing holy water toward us from a little plastic vial. "Irreconcilable differences."

I AM THE FACE OF PRO-CHOICE AMERICA

I was 17 years old in 1989, when I stood with my mother and two of her friends at the Capitol — childbearing age, though not thinking of bearing a child. I was contemplating my future in terms of dorm rooms and dining halls. I went to Washington because I could; if I felt a need to go, it was only because I didn’t want to be left out of an event my mother and her friends were going to be part of.

In 2004, in the middle of a speaker’s program of celebrities, politicians, and historic figures from the women’s-rights movement, we are told that a third of the marchers are under 25. When legendary feminist and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem asks us to applaud the young people in our midst, a roar goes up among the swells of the signed and stickered. I too am cheering, but this time out of an urgent sense of need; a desire to bond with the women I’ve come here with has very little to do with it. Nearly all my friends are of childbearing age; not all are thinking of bearing a child. I read the shirt of a young woman next to me: TODAY IS MY 18TH BIRTHDAY AND I VOTE FOR CHOICE.

MOTHER BY CHOICE, NOT CHANCE

In 1989, and again today, there are children on both sides of the barricades. The anti-choice protesters place posters of bloody fetuses in the hands of their toddlers. Their little boys hiss and flash us the thumbs-down sign. They cradle tiny babies in their arms while they shout at us that we should be ashamed.

Everywhere in the streets, the marchers celebrate with their children. Their strollers are decorated with signs and pompons; their faces are expectant, smiling. Unlike the kids on the other side of the barricades, these children aren’t symbols of a fight; they are the reason for it. A woman marching nearby is hugely pregnant, her shirt rolled up to reveal the bared evidence of her soon-to-be offspring. CHOICE BABY, she has scrawled across her stretched and swelling belly.

WE MUST NOT JUST FIGHT BACK. WE MUST FIGHT FORWARD.

That autumn day in 1989, I settled into my seat, put on headphones, and started to write. The college-application essay with which I’d been struggling for a month began to take shape. I described standing in the nation’s capital with my mother, raising my voice for something I believed in. I spoke of how important it was to use my voice to effect change, and I wrote of hoping to use it often, of never allowing it to be silenced.

Today, I switch on my computer as the car heads north toward home. And as my head swims with statistics and snapshots, with the burden and beauty of all I’ve seen and heard, again, in Washington, I start to write.

We are not going backwards, child. Do you hear me? Never again, y’all. Never again.

Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com


Issue Date: April 30 - May 6, 2004
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