STATE & NATIONAL NEWS

On June 23, 1979, 1,500 pro-choice women, men and children, / including two busloads from Cleveland, converged on Cincinnati from such distant points as Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and St. Louis to demonstrate their opposition to the policies of those who so arrogantly and erroneously designate themselves "Right to Life". As the crowd marched through downtown Cincinnati to a rally on the riverfront, the anti-abortion forces were holding a national convention in Covington, Kentucky, just across the water.

At the rally, the people cheered Therese Edell and Meg Christian, who had made a special trip from New York to be there. But the real focus was on the Speakers, each of whom illuminated from a different perspective the many dangers to women inherent in the anti-abortion movement. Fran Kissling, author of Rosie Jimanez: Investigation of a Wrongful Death, told something of Rosie, a poor MexicanAmerican woman. who died in 1977 from a backstreet abortion, her scholarship check in her purse. Kissling stated that “No woman should be forced to choose between aspiration and servitude”.

The next speaker, Margaret Willis of the Poor People's Campaign, pointed out that since the passage of the Hyde Amendment, the only choices for poor women are: bearing an unwanted child; having an illegal and possibly dangerous abortion; or undergoing sterilization. The U.S. Government, at the same time it withholds money for abortions for poor women, will fund 90 percent of the cost of sterilization for such women, and the number of poor and minority women getting sterilized has increased 350 percent in the past decade. In Puerto Rico, 35 percent of all women of childbearing age have been sterilized, courtesy of the U.S. Government. This is genocide, nothing less. Willis noted also that the welfare system is structured to give less

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CINCI DEMO

money for more children, so that every child born to a welfare mother has little chance of ever breaking out of the poverty to which s/he is born. The next, and perhaps most powerful, speaker was

Abortion is a RIGH

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Photo by Carol Epstein

Rhonda Copelon, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, who castigated the "retribution, arrogance and insensitivity” of the Hyde Amendment. To the anti-abortionists, nothing matters except a fertilized egg; the "right to life" means forced pregnancy. The goals of this religiously-based crusade against the fundamental liberty of women are much broader than to end abortion: they include widening and solidifying a conservative political base in this country which can serve to attack other basic freedoms.

If the Human Life Amendment propounded by the

Government Zaps Radiation Research

(Her Say)-A Roman Catholic nun is claiming that the National Cancer Institute torpedoed her research project after the researchers found a connection be!tween low-level radiation and premature aging. Sister | Rosalie Bertell said the Federal Government's Cancer Institute notified her research team in 1977 that further funding would be unavailable unless the team changed its line of research.

The nun and her fellow researchers were examining statistical data on health in a three-state area on the East Coast. The study's findings, Sister Bertell says, clearly showed that even X-rays were harmful enough to do lasting damage to the body; even a single spinal X-ray would speed up an adult's natural aging process by one year.

Sister Bertell says public health agencies currently

don't keep data on how much damage existing background radiation is doing to the health of the American population. She says we have no concrete figures to show that chronic diseases are happening to younger people more now than before. The escaped radiation from the damaged Three Mile Island Nuclear Reactor will definitely have a negative effect on public health, but because of the way public records are kept, "the individual won't be able to detect it."

The nun says that after the federal funding of her project was cut off, a congressional committee held hearings on the cut-off and ordered the project reinstated. So far, however, no money has been forthcoming and the researchers are now scattered.

More Abortion Funding Cuts

New York (LNS/New York Times, June 17, 1979)-New Jersey and Massachusetts have recently surfaced with repressive anti-abortion legislation; in the latter state the bill has been signed into law.

The New Jersey bill, which passed 51-17 in the State Assembly, is based on the issue of "informed consent" (it is modeled after a bill passed last year in Akron, Ohio!). Now before the Senate, the bill would make it a criminal offenso-up to ten years in prison—for anyone, in the words of the New York Timer, “to take the life of an infant who is aborted while still alive?”.

On June 12, Governor Edward J. King of Massachusetts signed a prohibitive abortion bill which forbids, the use of state or any other public funds for victims of rape or incest. Public school sonchers, municipal workers, county employees, relfare recipicats and others covered by the

net She Wants/Julv. 1979

Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission will all be denied abortion aid.

"The legislature's decision not to allow victims of rape and incest to get publicly-funded abortions is nothing short of idiotic," said Nancy Gertner, attorney for the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Massachusetts women may have a temporary reprieve: enactment of the law could be delayed because of a pending ACLU suit in the Supreme Court.

As repressive anti-abortion legislation is introduced in nearly every state, abortion rights forces have won a partial victory in North Carolina. That state's House of Representatives voted 72-42 to continue full Medicaid-funded abortions for poor

women.

anti-abortionists ever becomes law, Copelon stated, women and doctors could be charged as murderers. Because of the criminal sanctions in the amendment, the situation would be much worse than before 1973. Every women would be suspect; every miscarriage could be investigated. Copelon stressed that it is the pro-choice movement which really stands for life-to live and love as we choose, and to bear children in joy.

The crowd cheered at the announcement that the Mayor of Cincinnati declared the week of June 24-30 Gay Pride Week, and designated June 30 as Lesbian Gay Pride Day. True to form, the anti-abortionists at their convention attacked the mayor as being "antifamily," an epithet usually hurled at pro-choicers.

The June 23 rally was inspiring to those who ai tended, although media coverage, at at least in Cleveland, was disappointing compared to that given the anti-abortion convention. While the amount of media coverage usually does not accurately reflect the convictions of the majority of people, it can serve as a barometer of what issues, and what position on those issues, are considered politically expedient by those in power. Rep. Henry Hyde, perpetrator of the Hyde Amendment, said in an interview that he himself was surprised at the amount of publicity his anti-abortion position had gained him. The reporters at the anti-abortion convention stressed the fervor of its adherents and their confidence of their ultimate

success.

Feminists and other pro-choice advocates must not allow ourselves to be put on the defensive; we must not allow the right to abortion, so new and hardwon, to be taken from us by default. We must use every means at our disposal to protect our right to abortion and to regain it for all our sisters, or else we may lose all our reproductive and human rights to a determined, vocal and very skillful minority.

-Mary Walsh

Changing the Rules

(New York Times, June 28, 1979)-The inflammatory issue of Federal financing of abortions, which has frayed tempers and consumed many hours of debate in recent years, reached the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 27, but under strict ground rules designed to dampen controversy.

The annual appropriation bill for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which has traditionally touched off the abortion debate, arrived on the floor accompanied by a rule that permitted only two choices on the issue: a ban on almost all Federal financing of abortions or the 1978 compromise regarded as too restrictive by many liberals. Antiabortionists had persuaded the House Rules Committee to bar all other amendments.

For more than an hour, liberals of both parties urged the House to defeat the rule governing debate. Almost all of them had amendments they wished to offer on the floor, making public funds available for abortions under certain circumstances. But when the rule came up for a vote, the members who had attacked it were too slow in requesting a roll-call vote and the measure was approved by voice vote, without even a record of the extent of opposition.

In the debate, Representative Robert E. Bauman, R-Maryland, said there had been 28 votes on the abortion issue in Congress last year and the limiting rule would avoid the "agony" of the long debates that preceded them.

The Rules Committee had approved the limit on amendments without any roll call, either. One of its members, Representative Shirley Chisholm, D-N.Y., reportedly told colleagues she was tired of long and fruitless debates on the abortion issue.

The $73.6 billion Labor-HEW bill reached the floor with a provision banning Federal funding of abortions "except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term." This is the language repeatedly backed in the past by Representative Henry J. Hyde, R-III.