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By Christine Link
Published on Thursday, Jan 17, 2008
CLEVELAND: The race for the White House is in full swing. Come Election Day, abortion likely will be on voters' minds as candidates pull out the abortion card either to cast aspersions on their opponents or to stake a claim to a constituency.
Some voters will vote for or against candidates because of their position on the issue. Few, however, will consider what is really at stake in the abortion question: women's equality.
Roe v. Wade turns 35 on Tuesday. With this anniversary, we mark not only 35 years of reproductive freedom, but 35 years of impressive gains in the fight for women's equality.
Granted, these were not perfect years. Not all women have had equal access to reproductive health care: Poor women, teens and women living in rural communities have faced increasingly real obstacles because of government restrictions.
Likewise, not all women have benefitted equally in the expansion of women's access to higher education, better paying jobs and other socioeconomic gains.
And as with the fight for reproductive freedom, the struggle for women's equality is far from over.
Nevertheless, these decades have witnessed important advances for many women.
The numbers alone tell a significant piece of the story: Thirty-five years ago, there were 15 women in Congress; only three had ever held the office of governor of a state. Today, 92 women sit in Congress, including the first Madame Speaker of the House and 26 women who have served as governors.
In this year's race for president, for the first time in our nation's history, a woman candidate is one of the leading contenders for the nomination of a major political party.
The political arena has not been alone in this transformation. Women currently make up 57 percent of college students (up from 42 percent in 1970) and are obtaining advanced degrees in record numbers. In the mid-1970s, women made up only 16 percent of medical school graduates; today, they constitute nearly 50 percent.
Likewise, women holding science and engineering doctoral degrees have more than quadrupled since the late 1960s. And the ranks of female Fortune 500 CEOs have grown from one in 1973 to 10 in 2006.
The timing of these advances is not serendipitous. At the core of women's equality is the ability to control whether and when we have children. The legalization of contraception in the 1960s and of abortion in the 1970s fostered women's ability to make important life decisions about themselves and their families.
This fact is not lost on the only two women to date ever to serve on the Supreme Court. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor co-authored an opinion preserving Roe in 1992 that acknowledged, ''The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.''
And just last year, in a powerful dissent to a Supreme Court decision upholding the first-ever federal ban on certain abortion procedures, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passionately argued that the core of the right to abortion ''center(s) on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.''
Yet, as we mark the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the connection between reproductive rights and gender equality is lost in the political wrangling over abortion.
It is time to step back and re-examine the role that access to birth control and abortion plays not only in opening up the classrooms, boardrooms and legislatures to women, but to ensuring women's equality more broadly.
It is time to refocus the conversation on fairness and opportunity so that we all can make meaningful decisions about whether and when to bear children.
The political, economic and social life of our democracy depends on it.
CLEVELAND: The race for the White House is in full swing. Come Election Day, abortion likely will be on voters' minds as candidates pull out the abortion card either to cast aspersions on their opponents or to stake a claim to a constituency.
Get the full article here.
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