Fighting for choice in Texas

This week, Texas provided the country with two bizarre women’s rights stories. Waco, Texas listeners to a Christian radio station heard a call to boycott Girl Scout cookies. While no funds from cookie sales go to any pro-choice organization and though the Scouts take no position on abortion or sex education, the Girl Scouts logo is placed on posters advertising Planned Parenthood’s annual sex education seminar for fifth- through ninth-graders.Let’s follow this reasoning for a second. In order to prevent abortions, Pro-Life Waco would like girls to…be ignorant? If we assume that some of the girls who attend the seminar will someday have sex without wanting children, then the best way to prevent abortions is to make sure they don’t get pregnant in the first place. To do this, girls need to know how to protect themselves.To assume that, by not teaching safe sex, girls will not have sex is displaying dangerous ignorance. Of course, dangerous ignorance seems to be just what Pro-Life Waco is encouraging.This week also brought a challenge to Roe v. Wade. Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” of that case who has since become an anti-choice crusader, convinced the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the case. I can’t comment on the legality of this action, though it does seem strange the court would accept a challenge thirty years later by an appellant who has changed her mind. The arguments made in the case were not about McCorvey’s situation, but rather about the constitutionality of the Texas law prohibiting abortions, and those facts have not changed.She is going to court with “affidavits from more than 1,000 women who regret obtaining abortions,” according to a Feb. 20 Houston Chronicle story. I wonder – if abortions had been illegal for those 1,000 women, how many would be alive and healthy today? Back alley abortions are no myth. The hanger you see on buttons and posters is a disturbing but accurate reminder of pre-Roe abortions.Roe, and its aftermath, is not just about McCorvey. It is about all women in America having the right to control their own bodies. It is about government not having the right to force a woman to bear a child. It is about gender equality. Most of all, it is about choice. Pro-choice advocates are neither anti-life nor pro-abortion. Most pro-choice supporters, including myself, believe abortions should be legal, safe and rare. We believe women should know the facts and their rights. For anyone to say that knowledge will hurt girls or that women aren’t capable of making intelligent choices for themselves is insulting and very, very dangerous.Stoll can be reached at jstoll@campustimes.org.