As we await the decision from SCOTUS on Roe v Wade….and I am not optimistic that the court will do the right thing and preserve a right of women to choose……

But the Dems are fighting hard to save the right…..but that has NOT always been the case……

WE need to step into the “way back’ machine to the 1980s…..

For most poor Americans, the constitutional right to an abortion was effectively abolished in 1977 with the passage of the Hyde Amendment. By the late 80s, many states in the Midwest and South had fewer than five clinics statewide and they were so far away and the services so costly that the incidences of self-managed abortions began to rise, often with fatal results.

In order to grasp just how much culpability the Democrats deserve for the steady erosion of reproductive rights, perhaps it will be instructive to revisit Al Gore’s reactionary positions on “choice.” As a “New Democrat” Congressman in the 80s, Gore spoke reverentially of the “fetus’s right to life.” He was a relentless supporter of the Hyde Amendment, banning federal funding for abortions for poor women. In one early version of the Hyde Amendment there was language allowing for exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Gore voted against that.

The most far-reaching measure dreamed up by conservative right of that era to undermine Roe v. Wade was an amendment put forward in 1984 by Michigan Republican Mark Siljander. It carried a one-two punch. First, it defined the fetus as a “person” from the moment of conception. Second, it denied federal funding to any hospital or clinic that performed abortions. Gearing up for a senate run that year, Gore was one of 74 Democrats in the House who voted for Siljander’s ultimately unsuccessful measure.

Those votes returned to haunt Gore as his political ambitions went national. By 1988, he was brazenly trying to rewrite his political biography. He and his staff were well aware that his votes against choice would be brought up against him. “Since there’s a record of that vote,” an aide told US News & World Report in 1988, “in effect what we have to do is deny, deny, deny.”

The problem came to a head in 2000 during a debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with Bill Bradley, who used the occasion to flourish and read out a letter Gore had written to a Tennessee constituent in 1984: “It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that someday we will see the outrageously high number of abortions drop steeply. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected and I have an open mind on how to further this goal.”

(Jeffrey St. Clair)

I am one of the few that did not worship at the feet of the so-called ‘new Democrats’….the only ‘new’ about them is their propensity to screw the average American.

We now wait the announcement of the loss of another right…..

If this right is abolished which will be the next to go?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”