Welcome to the Online Archive of the Old PublicEye.Org WebsiteIf You Are Looking for the Current Website for Political Research Associates, Please Click HerePlease remember that this is an archive of an older website for researchers, and it is not being updated. |
|
We Always Resist: Trust Black Women
Summer 2011 This timely documentary film captures the activism of Black women in response to the anti-abortion movement and their attacks on women of color through a national billboard campaign. This film is a vital tool to fight against human rights violations and will provide activists and community organizers the opportunity to discuss the issue of abortion rights and activism.
Father's
Rights Groups Threaten Women's Gains—And Their Safety In June 2010, Ned Holstein, the president of the national group Fathers and Families, appeared on a Boston call-in radio show to promote a child-custody bill before the Massachusetts legislature. “The message is so simple,” he said. “We’re fit parents, most of us. We just want to be involved in helping to raise our children…. [Divorced] children have a hole in their heart. The average child would crawl over broken glass to see their absent parent.…. [This bill] is a very mild nudge in the direction of getting both parents to be involved.” This mild-mannered approach to child custody, a major issue in contested divorces, hides the real agenda of Fathers and Families.
Abortion as
“Black Genocide” This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.com, created by the Radiance Foundation—a vaguely defined antiabortion and “personal transformation” nonprofit founded by biracial advertising executive Ryan Bomberger—with funding from Georgia Right to Life.
Anti-Abortion Strategy in the Age of Obama It didn’t turn out like they had planned. Two decades of political investment by the anti-abortion movement and the Religious Right did not result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Even conservative Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged during his confirmation hearing, “Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land.” Then the rising prospects of the Democratic Party, and the historic election of the prochoice president Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, seemed to have secured Roe for the foreseeable future. But due to the success of the notion of “abortion reduction,” the general approach driving the politics of the anti-abortion movement for at least two decades, all has not been lost. Read more...
Exporting "Traditional Values" In August, at the fifth World Congress of Families (WCF) in Amsterdam, Austin Ruse, president of the New York-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) warned “that UN radicals in alliance with radical lawyers and judges and other advocates around the world are attempting the greatest power grab the world has even known.” What they want, he continued, is to impose their nefarious agenda—support for abortion and gay rights—on unsuspecting developing countries thereby leading to a “tsunamic change in social policy and in the international system.” Read more... Janice Shaw Crouse Exactly two months before abortion provider George Tiller was assassinated in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas, Janice Shaw Crouse lent her voice to the chorus of pundits criticizing Tiller’s unwavering support for women who sought his services. In a column published by the right-wing site Town Hall, Crouse is unsparing in denouncing not only Tiller for his “barbaric slaughter,” but also the women who use his services. Read more... Guest Commentary: Killing for Life Returns The murder of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas raises again the question of what it means to defend life through killing. When militant antiabortionists began bombing clinics and shooting doctors in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement officials looked for some conspiracy among the perpetrators. They did not find conspiracy. What they needed to look for was a cultural explanation for how members of a movement dedicated to defending life began to kill for life. Read More...
Report! Marriage as a Cure for Poverty? This report exposes the questionable social science justifying George W. Bush’s campaign to promote marriage as a cure for poverty. Rightist academics and think tank researchers ignore data showing that pushing low-income women and men to marry might actually diminish a low income woman’s chances of rising out of poverty, and rely on evidence and reasoning that do not meet scholarly standards. The report is a companion to Dr. Hardisty’s earlier report Pushed to the Altar: The Right Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion. Read more...
For the leaders and workers of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, attacks from right-wing foes are nothing new. Almost from the moment that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the federation and its clinics have been in the sights of right-wing activists, most horrifically in 1994 during the harrowing siege of a Brookline, Massachusetts, clinic when a gunman took the lives of two workers in the name of God. Read more...
From the podium at the Christian Right's Values Voter Summit in mid-September, National Review Institute's Kate O'Beirne, 59, pronounced that the "selection of Sarah Palin [as the GOP vice presidential nominee] sounded the death knell of modern American feminism." "She's a prick to the liberal establishment, to the feminists, and to the men who fear them," she jeered to the audience of Christian Right activists. And when Phyllis Schlafly, 84, threw anti-feminist red meat to the cheering crowd, a 60-plus woman in the audience turned to me and said proudly she had been with Ms. Schlafly since the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s. Read more...
Pushed to the Altar After the 2000 presidential campaign, I felt a shock of recognition when I read that the George W. Bush Administration planned to use its "faith-based" funding to support organizations to encourage women, especially welfare recipients, to marry. The rationale was that marriage would cure their poverty. Wade Horn, appointed by Bush to be in charge of welfare programs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), had been the titular head of “fatherhood movement.” Now inside the government, he morphed his fatherhood campaign of the 1990s - which promoted men as the God-given leader of families and obedient wives - into a government program to promote heterosexual marriage and fatherhood as a solution to the poverty of those who remained as welfare recipients. Read More...
Former PRA Director Katherine H. Ragsdale delivers Keynote speech on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade at the Protecting Privacy, Preserving Choice conference An event sponsored by Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts and Tapestry Health.
Understanding the Right (PowerPoint Presentation) Senior Researcher Pam Chamberlain presented this workshop at the New Leadership Networking Initiative national meeting in March 2007. It argues that Reproductive Justice cannot be attained without understanding the opposition. On Reproductive Justice Opposition to reproductive rights in this country extends much further back in time than the fight to legalize abortion. In the nineteenth century legislation criminalized abortion and doctors saw pregnancy as a disease. In the 1970s, a backlash movement swiftly followed the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, setting the tone of the conflict ever since. To the women's movement, access to abortion represents women's ability to control their own lives. But in defense of a natural, Biblically mandated order, the Christian Right has always been interested in a much broader agenda than just banning abortion. Its comprehensive "family values" approach also targets access to emergency contraception, the vaccine for the human papilloma virus, comprehensive sexuality education, single parenting, and what they call "anchor babies," the children of undocumented immigrants who receive citizen status because they were born in the United States. By contrast, the goal of the today's reproductive justice movement is the total health and well-being of all women and their children, acknowledging not only the diversity of women living in the United States today but the connectedness of their social, political, and health care needs. Flashback Punishment, Reproductive Control, and the Construction of Unfit/Fit MothersFrom the Defending Justice Activist Resource Kit By Rachel Roth |
Defending Reproductive Justice
PRA's easy-to- Links to Adversaries
Spotlight On
Explore
Political Research Associates
PRA is an affiliate of: Copyright Information, Terms, and Conditions Please read our Terms and Conditions for copyright information regarding downloading, copying, printing, and linking material on this site; our disclaimer about links present on this website; and our privacy policy. |