Leila Abolfazli, Senior Counsel

Thank you Roe.

It’s not easy to identify the moment when I became a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. I think it really just seemed quite obvious to me -- women must have to have the right to choose when they will carry pregnancies to term. I think it was so obvious that I never really thought about the world before the right was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1973. I couldn’t imagine a world where a woman had no choice when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. I couldn’t imagine a life without Roe.

Indeed, I was so clueless that I never really got what was going on in that one scene in Dirty Dancing. You know the one, where there is a hurried, distressed discussion of dirty hangers and you are given a quick scary view of the beautifully-blond dancer shaking and sweating. True, I wasn’t even a preteen when I watched the movie for the first (of a hundred) time. But I really never got how forward-looking that whole scene was even if the rest of the movie was a bunch of serious cheese (that I still love to watch).

Not until I watched that scene more recently did I really think of what it was like before Roe. What that scene told us is that women risked their lives when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, the “back alley” abortion scenario. But to think that life before Roe was just about back alley abortions or clandestine abortions, is also to ignore the efforts that led to Roe and what Roe ultimately said about women’s autonomy (even if not explicitly in the opinion). This is not just about abortions. This is about the women’s movement, about giving women more of a role in the world than child bearing and rearing.

Here’s to a new year.

Arriving at the National Women’s Law Center three months ago, I never anticipated just how sustained and systemic the efforts to dismantle women’s health and reproductive rights had become.  Sure, I had paid attention to the Planned Parenthood defunding fight (which included the “trade” for a ban on DC funding of abortion services and the “this is not meant to be a factual statement” debacle) and had heard about HR 3 and the disgusting “forcible rape” debate. Indeed, it was those events that informed my decision to work on reproductive rights issues full time. But even though I was aware of what was going on, it was only when I became involved with the issues on a daily basis where I gained a whole new perspective on just how far those who oppose reproductive rights are going in order to completely unravel women’s rights. And it got me thinking, if so many bad things can happen in just my three months here, what will 2012 look like?

So in order to be prepared for this year, I decided to give a quick review of my first three months – a recap of the numerous anti-choice measures that cropped up in just the final months of 2011. Because when you lay it all out, you can’t ignore how serious these efforts really are.

In my very first week, the House of Representatives voted on HR 358, which literally would allow women to die at hospitals instead of getting the emergency care they need if it included abortion care. Seriously?