Be A Hero!
The most important thing you can do to defend abortion rights is to vote in the upcoming election on November 8th.
If you have time, money, energy or any one of these things, please consider phone banking, or writing postcards, or door to door canvassing. Contact your local abortion fund to find out what you can do. While every election is important this election is of primary importance for abortion rights as it will determine control of both the House and the Senate. Every vote in every state counts.
In some states the stakes are even higher.
No State Constitutional Right to Abortion Initiative:
In Kentucky Constitutional amendment #2 would amend the state constitution to declare that nothing in the constitution protects a right to abortion or requires government funding for abortion. Although abortion is illegal in Kentucky this amendment would make it more difficult for abortion rights advocates to challenge the states abortion laws. A similar law was rejected in Kansas due to a grassroots, on the ground campaign by reproductive rights advocates. The women of Kentucky need your help.
Constitutional right to Abortion initiatives:
California, Michigan, and Vermont all have initiatives amending their state constitutions to establish an explicit right to abortion. Ask everyone you know in these states to vote in favor of these initiatives.
Remember the heroes who led the fight for Roe v. Wade and those who continued the fight as more and more restrictions were put on a woman’s freedom to choose.
Pat Maginnis who in 1961 founded the Society for Humane Abortion and researched doctors who did abortions in Mexico and Japan. She received thousands of letters from women seeking abortions and mailed each of them a list of available doctors.
Pat Maginnis died on August 30, 2021. “After all she went through, including risking going to prison, she couldn’t have imagined this kind of rollback,” Elana Bloom, Ms. Maginnis’ grandniece, said in a phone interview. NYTimes 2021
In 1962 Sheri Finkbine who was pregnant with her fifth child, found out that the pills she was taking to help her sleep were thalidomide. At first, she was granted a therapeutic abortion arranged by her physician. However when she spoke out to alert other women to the dangers of thalidomide, the hospital refused to do the abortion. She and her family were targeted, the FBI had to be called in. Eventually she had the abortion in Sweden.
Nearly 90 Sherri Chessen (Finkbine) was interviewed on The Morning Show after the June 24th ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. The interviewer asked if it was a scary time for her.
“It was very scary,” Chessen said. “And I just heard on the radio yesterday where women here – because of the trigger laws – are being thrown out of their doctor’s office. I know how that feels because, you know what? 60 years ago, it’ll be 60 years – don’t do the math – in August, I was thrown out of my doctor’s office, out of the city, and out of the state.”
Dr. Susan Wicklund, a sole provider of abortions in some parts of the Midwest in the 1990s was stalked and threatened with death. Dr. Wicklund had to use disguises, wear a bulletproof vest, and sometimes carry a gun to enter her clinic to perform abortions. In an interview Dr. Wicklund said… “this is absurd. I, as a physician in the United States of America performing a legal procedure, have to go to these measures to make it possible for me to go to work.”
The Pink House Defenders who until June 7, 2022 escorted women into the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. There are no laws in Mississippi to protect a woman’s right of entrance to the clinic, so these volunteers stood out there in the blazing sun, encouraging women, talking back to the protestors, giving safe passage past the mob, sometimes for nine hours a day.
Don’t let these heroes down.
Don’t let women who should have bodily autonomy down.
Be a Hero
Get involved in a campaign to support or defeat state constitutional amendments.
Most of all VOTE and encourage everyone you know to do the same.