President Obama has called on leaders of both sides of the debate on whether women should have the right to legal abortion to come together to find "common ground."
But it is cold-blooded, vicious actions like today's assassination that make it hard for those of us in the pro-choice community to find common ground with those on the other side. It is lawless, violent behavior like this that makes us fear for our lives and our families. When they sit down across from us, they have no reason to believe that we come to the table with violent intentions. Today is a brutal reminder that we are not privileged to have the same sense of security.
It's not just violence, though. The violence is natural end of the logic of coercion, and coercion is precisely what anti-choice activists are all about. It's not just mere happenstance that violence comes from the anti-choice side, and not the other way around. This is the very essence of the issue: coercion vs. choice.
Cristina Page had a great op-ed in the Baltimore Sun this week, making a plea that when journalists question presidential hopefuls (of both parties) about their reproductive rights beliefs, that they specifically bring up contraception access.
Why? Because when the Republican presidential hopefuls speak to a roomful of forced-pregnancy advocates, they are doing everything but declaring their desire for a birth-control ban. These are things they're not saying in interviews with national media, or during the debates.
Deep down, there's nothing really new about this. The hard-core anti-choice doesn't want to overturn Roe. That's never been their aim. They want to overturn Griswold But, of course, that message is not ready for primetime. And so it never gets discussed.
It's time to change that. And one way to help do that is via a national battleground district poll, which I've talked about specifically here, and have discussed as part of an organizing strategy here. First I want to explore the issue, then I want to talk about its place in the battleground district poll, and finally, I want to talk about its place in an organizing strategy. All on the flip.
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