an amazing piece on the rights of the BORN

i have not read anne lamott before. i am going to now. what she has written here is simple yet beautiful and right on the mark. no rich white man (or man of any level for that matter) has a right to tell ME and MY SISTERS what we can and cannot do with our bodies (or our minds)

The rights of the born By Anne Lamott, ANNE LAMOTT is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent book is "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" (Riverhead, 2005).
EVERYTHING WAS going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree — the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president's war in Iraq. Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and everyone just lost his or her mind. Or, at any rate, I did.
Maybe it was the way in which the man couched the question, which was about how we should reconcile our progressive stances on peace and justice with the "murder of a million babies every year in America." The man who asked the question was soft-spoken, neatly and casually dressed. ...........


...............But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor — but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove.

I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo-ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls "snowflake babies," and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans. .......