In The American Prospect, Cherisse Scott, founder of SisterReach, an African-American “reproductive justice” group centered in Memphis, laments the passage in Tennessee of Amendment 1 this past month.
Amendment 1 undoes a 2000 Tennessee Supreme Court decision that blocked any pro-life laws from being passed in the state. Scott writes:
by Carder It’s true that, for political reasons, we can’t afford for those on the other side to be the only ones talking about this issue. But I’ll go a step further: If we in the pro-choice movement don’t start paying serious attention to the ways in which our own practices contribute to the dehumanization […]
Planned Parenthood executive VP Dawn Laguens (pictured above right) took Glover Park Group’s founding partner Carter Eskew (pictured below right) apart in a drippingly sarcastic August 22 Huffington Post piece, “Thanks for the lecture”:
In a recent Washington Post blog post… Eskew took the reproductive rights movement to task, and not a minute too soon by his watch. In his column, he explains that advocates for reproductive health are mired in “convoluted, poll-tested messaging” and “cannot win the debate as it is currently framed.” He probably imagines he’s doing us a favor, but he instead seems to be just tuning in to a conversation that’s literally happening all around him.
In his WashPo piece, Eskew basically concurred with me, without naming names, that pro-abortion messaging has become a hot mess:
Heartbroken by the events unfolding in #Ferguson?. A parent’s right to raise their child in love and safety, and to dream that their child will have every opportunity in the world to grow into a fiercely independent adult is a fundamental issue of reproductive justice. As a feminist, as an organizer, and most of all […]
I wrote on August 4 that a July 28 New York Times article about Planned Parenthood’s decision to abandon the term “pro-choice” had triggered a race war within the abortion movement.
This was because Planned Parenthood steered NYT journalist Jackie Calmes to seven white leaders of abortion groups for quotes but no women of color.
Plus, Planned Parenthood gave no credit to WOC groups for expanding on abortion advocacy to include other “reproductive justice” issues, a term WOC coined two decades ago. This July 31 tweet didn’t come out of nowhere…
If you didn’t know what was going on inside pro-abortion world, the Huffington Post piece Planned Parenthood Executive VP Dawn Laguens posted on July 30 in response to the July 28 New York Times article, “Advocates shun ‘pro-choice’ to expand message,” would seem out of left field.
As I explained in a blog last week, the NYT article simply elaborated on a decision Planned Parenthood made 18 months ago to abandon the term “pro-choice” as antiquated.
This is where Laguens seemed to go off on a tangent:
In January 2013 came news that shocked both sides of the abortion debate: Planned Parenthood had determined the term “pro-choice” was no longer helpful and recommended abandoning it.
This news really was titanic. “Pro-choice” was the abortion movement’s self-chosen descriptive term for over 40 years. To abandon it was to abandon an identity, surely unnerving to activists on the street, who found cover and solace in the euphemism.
by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
