March for Women's Lives
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Dorothy Freeman, an Alamedan, flew to Washington, D.C. with her sister to
take part in the biggest demonstration ever staged in the capital on April
25, 2004. Hundreds of thousands from the U.S. and 60 countries
participated in the March for Women's Lives. |
The BBC reported on 26 April 2004 about the size of the demonstration, "police sources informally estimated it at between 500,000 and 800,000 according to AP, while organisers put it at 1.15 million." |
A federal judge declared on June 2 that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is unconstitutional, saying the measure infringes on a woman's right to choose. Reported on SF GATE, the San Francisco Chronicle, on-line. The article titled, "Federal judge says partial-birth abortion ban unconstitutional", was written by David Kravets, Associated Press Writer, Tuesday, June 1, 2004
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The Alameda Report interviewed Dorothy (shown holding a
sign that reads, "California, a pro-choice State") the day after
she returned from the March.
AR: Why did you go?
D: Because I think standing up for women's lives is important. I
think we should, as a group, stand together and make sure that we have a
voice.
AR: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
D: I'm about 60 years old and I grew up in a time when abortion
was a sin and was not legal. And many, many women died. We just had no
ability to decide when we would or would not have children. I happened to be in my
Twenties at the time that the first birth control pills came out. So I
didn't have quite the problems that my mother's generation did. My mother
actually had nine children because she had no way to control what her life
would be. So she just spent her life raising seven of the nine children. We should be
able to have a choice and not have someone else dictating to us what we do
with our lives.
AR: You say we. Who did you go with?
D: I went with my sister who is a bit younger than me. Actually, she
had a legal abortion back in the Sixties. If she had gone one more day
without the doctor's permission...you had to get three doctors to certify
that you were going to commit suicide or something in those days in order
to get a legal abortion...if she had gone one more day and if they hadn't given their
permission, she could not have had that abortion.
AR: Why did she go?
D: Because I asked her to and she believes in many of the same things.
For one thing, she lived through what it was like to be petrified of being
pregnant, and young, and unmarried, and not knowing what will happen if you
are forced to go through with this. She believes...the way she said it
when we were interviewed on the sidewalk...she believes it's going to take women
to change the world.
AR: Does she think the march is part of that?
D: Oh, absolutely. Yes.
AR: And you obviously do.
D: Oh, yes. I thought that if women don't stand together, we
will lose our rights because there are people working to do just that. And we
don't work to keep our rights, then we're responsible for what happens to
us.
AR: Was it a march for abortion?
D: No. It's presented that way in the news, but it was a march
for choice and for all aspects of women's lives. And the fact that women
should have control of their lives whether they want to have a family or
not have a family. If they want to be a diverse family of different kinds
of relationships as in your gay and lesbian type of relationships...as they
said in one of the speeches, they have reproductive problems, too. Our
bodies are something that needs to be taken care of.
Medical care for so many in this world is becoming so hard. Let's put it
this way. There are many groups who've always had trouble getting medical
care. And it's just now becoming a problem for white, middle-class
American women. Pretty soon these white, middle-class women are going to be in
the same boat as Hispanic women, Black women, minority women of any color
or financial means that have problems getting medical care now. It's
becoming harder and harder all the time.
But the government doesn't seem to care whether we have the things that we
need to raise families with. You know, if you choose to have children, you
can't raise them without proper medical care, without proper prenatal care,
without proper food to feed your children, without jobs to go to so you can
get the food and the medical care that you need to raise your children.
Without the education. Education is just going away. States are in such
dire straits now that education is going backwards, not forward, like the
No Child Left Behind program was supposed to guarantee.
Click here to see more of the demonstration witnessed by Dorothy.
