Nonviolent Choice Shares Its Vision With Change.gov

Turn the Clock Forward is inviting progressive prolifers to share their visions with Barack Obama and his administration through the change.gov website. Nonviolent Choice has taken up the invitation:

Dear President-Elect Obama,

I hope you will make good on your campaign promises and make a real, result-producing effort to bring prolifers and prochoicers together in an effort to alleviate the root causes of abortion.

In developing an action plan to reduce abortion, please call upon those of us who identify as pro *every* life, born and unborn, before, during, and ever after birth. We do exist. In fact, we have existed for centuries, often at the forefront of justicemaking movements of every kind. But US culture has all too often shut out what we have to say, even burying and suppressing our history.

The audacity of hope? I am audacious enough to hope that you and your administration will listen to everything we have to offer on the urgent matter of reducing abortion.

Sincerely,
Mary Krane Derr, Editor
Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info and nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com
Co-Editor of the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition (Feminism & Nonviolence Studies Association, 2005)

But Wait, There's More

Now that the US elections are over (for the next couple years, anyway) here is another action alert, from the progressive Christian group Sojourners (by way of the coalition Consistent Life, which Nonviolent Choice belongs to).

Sojourners has a new online petition calling upon President-Elect Barack Obama to adopt an action plan based on respect for all lives. It includes "common ground policies which can dramatically reduce abortions in America, and help bring us together on this divisive issue."

The petition has some Christian and religious language, but the actions it calls for can surely be advocated by people of all faiths and none. So please use your own discretion in deciding whether to sign. And if you do not feel comfortable signing the statement, but agree with its action plan, then you can send your own letter to Obama's Senate Office, while he is still there, of course.

The Palin Pregnancy Uproar

Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin identifies herself as a prolife feminist. Now I do not understand how that self-description squares with her poor environmental record, or her vote for abstinence-only sex education (among other things). But evidently (as of 2006, anyway) she is pro contraception. And to all signs, she has personally responded to not only her own but her daughter's crisis pregnancy as one hopes a prolife feminist would.

The US is all abuzz about the just publicly disclosed unplanned pregnancy of her 17 year old Bristol. The governor and her family decided to make this disclosure in the wake of ugly rumors that she was actually the grandmother and Bristol the mother of Trig, Sarah's baby born earlier this year with Down Syndrome.

The rumors evidently first got publicity from a diary posted on the liberal blogging site Daily Kos. It has since been removed, but, wanting to go to the source and form my own impressions, I saw it before it was.

I think people of any political school could agree, it was pretty low down. Some of the inhouse comments on the diary said as much, questioning whether this was slander and do you really want to sacrifice a teen just to bring down a candidate.

But others exulted about the Antichoice Harridan 'n' Hypocrite Exposed!, even saying that Gov. Palin shamed and used her daughter and took credit for not aborting the baby so she could look like a big fat antichoice saint and make others feel guilty for having abortions.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama responded to the uproar in a dignified manner. He pronounced candidates' families and especially their children (he is a protective father) off-limits in the campaign. And he promised to fire any of his own staff who spread around any of the abovementioned rumors. Barack did note that his own mother gave birth to him at age 18--suggesting even further sympathy with the Palin clan.

I think the whole onslaught against Sarah Palin and her daughter just goes to show, in a writ especially large fashion, the point Linda Naranjo-Huebl made in this blog not two weeks ago about the onslaught of ugly judgments still heaped on women with crisis or unplanned pregnancies.

I can only hope that Barack Obama's empathy for the Palin family-- along with Sarah Palin's now fully public welcome of not only her own fetus with Down Syndrome, but her pregnant daughter, and unborn grandchild-- will suggest something to the US collective consciousness/conscience. Namely, that there are other and better ways of responding to difficult pregnancies than such judgmentality-- whether that judgmentality puts on progressive or conservative clothes.