This Week in the Mercury
Monday, April 19, 2010
Girls Only! The Youths: More Anti-Abortion than Ever?
Posted by Sarah Mirk on Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 2:38 PM
I haven't read Newsweek in years (shlock!) but this week NARAL pointed out an interesting article about how younger voters are becoming lukewarm on abortion rights. No one even turns out to a pro-choice protest anymore, it seems, while pro-lifers are going around invigorating the grassroots youth. From the piece:
March 21, 2010, will go down as the day Congress cleared the way for health-care reform. Yet for those in the abortion-rights community, March 21 will mark a completely different turning point: the day when they became acutely aware of their waning influence in Washington... This past January, when [NARAL President Nancy] Keenan's train pulled into Washington's Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. It was the 37th annual March for Life, organized every year on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe. "I just thought, my gosh, they are so young," Keenan recalled. "There are so many of them, and they are so young." March for Life estimates it drew 400,000 activists to the Capitol this year. An anti-Stupak rally two months earlier had about 1,300 attendees.
Jessica Wakeman over at The Frisky tears the article apart in a post today, saying that the youths aren't more anti-abortion rights than they were 30 years ago, they're just more used to having abortion rights be a normal fact of life:
Newsweek‘s proclamation that young voters are “lukewarm” about their reproductive rights is just straight-up wrong: They are rights we’ve always known, so we are not willing to see them taken away. And with so many ways to control our reproduction — the pill, the patch, Depo-Provera, IUDs, Seasonale, etc. etc. — I’d wager we’re more personally engaged with our reproductive health than any other generation before us.
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