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For abortion rights new generation { April 24 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38353-2004Apr23.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38353-2004Apr23.html
For Abortion Rights, a Changing of the Guard
Younger Feminists Introduce New Issues, More Nuanced Positions
By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2004; Page C01
The voices of the abortion rights movement are changing. As young take over for the old, reason is replacing wrath and nuance, the earlier -- and perhaps necessary -- absolutes.
You can hear the change in the soft timbre of Leanna Heffner, a Vassar College student who identifies herself as "very pro-choice" and at the same time believes in restricting late-term abortions. You can hear it in the matter-of-factness of Alene Adams, a 22-year-old blacksmith in Montpelier, Vt., who says she had her first abortion when she was 11, a second when she was 13. "Kids need their parents to help make that decision," she says of parental notification requirements. It would have angered her "if there had been a law -- but it's for the best."
According to various polls, young Americans have moderated their views on abortion since the early 1990s. A UCLA survey of college freshmen in 2003, for example, showed 55 percent of entering students thought abortions should be legal, a decline of 12 percent from a high of 67 percent in the 1992 class.
The Gallup organization reported earlier this year that 52 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds say that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances. What some of the acceptable restrictions might be was suggested in another survey conducted for MTV, that broadcasting icon of the young, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Two-thirds of 18-to-24-year-olds in that poll said a young woman seeking an abortion should have to wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure and, if younger than 18, obtain her parents' consent.
Many of these young adults will walk alongside the older pioneers tomorrow in the March for Women's Lives supporting reproductive freedom, an event whose sponsors include NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Association for Women. They say they are grateful for the elders' work. But it is telling that they have scheduled their own event, as well, for today: a day-long gathering on sexual health under the banner of Choice USA, the Third Wave Foundation and similar groups.
While veteran activists like Eleanor Smeal and Gloria Steinem host a $250-per-person cocktail reception this afternoon, the younger ones will be in conference rooms at the Omni Shoreham discussing day-after contraception pills and abortion funding for poor women. The theme, the young feminists say, is that it's time for a change in abortion rights leadership.
"When you look at the primary organizations who put together Sunday's march, their members are all over 30," says 24-year-old Grayson Crosby, who helped arrange today's discussions. "We wanted to make sure there was a space for younger voices to be heard."
Young abortion rights advocates bristle at the suggestion by some hardliners that their generational move toward the center is a result of antiabortion propaganda -- or that they take for granted the rights won by the previous generation of feminists. What has made the difference, says Crosby, is that many of them have been involved with legal abortions -- either working in the field of reproductive health, in their personal lives or in both -- since their teenage years. "We've realized there are deeper layers that no one was talking about," Crosby says.
Crosby, recently named one of the top 30 abortion rights activists under 30 by Choice USA, started volunteering at a Planned Parenthood clinic when she was 13, and six years later went to work for the organization as an educator and trainer. Throughout her four years at the University of Florida she heard conversations that convinced her of something previous generations didn't talk about: Human beings are hard-wired to create life and instinctively repulsed by the idea of destroying it, even when that's the right thing to do.
"I was talking to a lot of groups who were incredibly feminist, who would say things like, 'I don't feel comfortable with late-term abortion,' or 'I don't believe in using abortion as birth control.' When a national spokeswoman says, 'It's just a woman's right to choose,' she's not acknowledging the questions such women have."
Crosby experienced her own crisis two years ago when she became pregnant. Despite all the coaching she had done and all the friends she could have turned to, "I felt like a bad person because I felt so sad and confused. I never once questioned whether I should have an abortion, but I wondered why is there not any conversation anywhere about these feelings?"
She recently joined the board of directors of an adoption center and founded the Choice Education Project, a consulting group that trains medical professionals and community groups on client-centered counseling and pregnancy options. When it comes to reproductive decisions, one size does not fit all, she says, and if the over-30 crowd doesn't make space for contradictory feelings and opinions, "it will lose the very freedoms it has fought so hard to secure."
Crosby's mother, Ryan, is moved when she hears her daughter talking in ways that she, strongly pro-choice in the late 1960s, never would have. "That earlier dialogue was very radical, very angry, very mixed up with the women's movement," she remembers. "There was one point of view and it wasn't very encompassing."
She admires the way her daughter reaches out to people with different points of view in an effort to find positions of agreement. She says she never talks about abortion outside her circle of like-minded friends, perhaps because she never learned to.
Frank talk about sexuality is a hallmark of this generation. Alea Woodlee, one of the organizers of today's gathering, says she and her peers have no choice but to be forthright: Although 4 in 10 women will have an abortion, 5 in 10 between the ages of 18 and 25 will have a sexually transmitted disease. The phrase "pro-choice" must be redefined to address all their concerns, she says.
Priscilla Padilla, an abortion counselor in San Francisco, says she and many of her friends don't even like being labeled "pro-choice."
"It puts us in a box that is hard to get out of," she says.
This independence helps explain how Padilla -- a politically liberal, first-generation Mexican American -- can debate abortion rights with a politically conservative Orthodox Jew and still consider him one of her best friends. Or why Dina Morad, a young grantmaker for a nonprofit organization in Washington, doesn't run away from a conversation with a new acquaintance who is opposed to abortion.
"I have not met one person who is very anti-choice," she says. "I have met people who said they would never think about having an abortion but they always add it's the person's choice."
Another defining characteristic of this generation, which some young feminists believe may be crucial to their long-term success, is the ease with which young women and young men relate to each other. Increasingly, women say men should be notified when their girlfriends or wives get pregnant and consulted about the decision to proceed with the birth or abort -- a concept of inclusion anathema to earlier activists.
And young men say it's about time women caught on. In his college newspaper in Portland, Ore., student Jason Damron wrote a column about accompanying his pregnant girlfriend to an abortion and crying in the lobby as he waited for her to emerge. "An overhaul is needed among reproductive health organizations," he wrote, which "must include an emphasis on treating the whole woman, and her decisions, and the important people in her life with equality and empathy."
"I don't see men making the choice," says Natalia Lopez, 25, a program associate for a Washington grantmaking organization. "But we need them as our allies."
Allies they could be, for in national polls, young men register as much approval for abortion rights as young women. "The movement has been hostile towards men, and perhaps that was a useful survival mechanism in the early years," says Andy Wong, a development officer for a community organization in San Francisco. "But the movement will only succeed if it actively works to bring all people into the fold."
Abortion rights veterans show signs that they are listening. Web sites of longtime organizations such as NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) include pages directed at their under-30 members (they won't say how many there are, however). NARAL threw a reception for young professionals earlier this week and is hosting, along with PunkVoter.com, a rock concert tonight.
The Feminist Majority, Eleanor Smeal's organization, has organized busloads of students from more than 300 campuses to come to the Sunday march. A simple change in that march also shows the power of the under-30 group: Its name was altered twice, from Choice March to Freedom of Choice March, then to March for Women's Lives.
Kate Michelman, perhaps the country's most visible abortion rights proponent, is stepping down this year after 20 years as president at NARAL. As much as she admires the generation that will replace her and colleagues, she worries.
When laws are rewritten requiring parental notification of abortions for minors (32 states now have such rules), or a delay in the abortion procedure (now in 18 states), she sees dangerous retreat, not necessary adjustment. When the young start talking about multiple health issues, she tells them that's politically risky because "when it gets into tactics and how you win a battle, you have to focus your message."
"The political landscape has never been more hostile to abortion," she says. At the same time: "We are at a generational change. We'll have to learn from [young people] how best to respond to their different reality."
Shula Reinharz, director of the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, is also a member of the older guard who speaks of abortion rights as "being challenged, chipped away. Everybody feels we've lost ground" since 1973, she says.
And yet, she says, "the issue of rights was defined in one way at one time and now needs to be re-examined." Technology, for example, is raising a host of questions that have compelled her to reconsider abortion as "a blanket right."
"Say you produce an embryo and you discover you are carrying a boy or a girl and you want the other. Is your right to that abortion the same right as a woman who is the victim of incest?"
Bring on that question, the young people say, and listen to us debate it as well as other sticky issues. Recruit the doubters in our generation -- just as the major groups opposing abortion have been doing for a decade or more.
Reinharz is convinced: "We feminists need to think about all of this in a fresh way."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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