Posted on 01/26/2004 4:29:34 PM PST by bicycle thug
PORTLAND - The wife of Gov. Ted Kulongoski says younger women need to be reminded about the importance of the right to an abortion in a time of shifting political values.
Mary Oberst made a rare public speech over the weekend to recall the days when abortions were outlawed and women lost jobs, got kicked out of school and were put at risk after getting pregnant.
Oberst told about 400 people at an abortion rights banquet Saturday that younger women don't fully appreciate what it was like before the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion legal 31 years ago in the famous Roe vs. Wade ruling.
They don't know ``the fear, the danger, the loss of control over the most private decisions,'' said Oberst, an attorney who works for the Oregon State Bar. ``We don't ever want to go back to those days.''
The speech was part of the ``Celebration for Choice'' sponsored by the Oregon chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Although Oberst has given a handful of speeches to large audiences, she generally has kept a low profile since her husband took over as governor one year ago.
Kulongoski admitted that he was nervous for his wife before her speech.
``It's a tough business,'' the governor said. ``She's a very private person. But there are some things she believes in very, very strongly, and this is one of them.''
Oberst was joined on stage by Portland writer Ursula Le Guin. Both told stories about how abortion laws affected their lives, either directly or indirectly. Both said legalized abortions allow women the freedom to dream and determine their own destinies.
Oberst said she attended a Catholic high school that had no courses on birth control. Two of the brightest students became pregnant and had to drop out. Oberst said she took over a job one of the girls held as a cashier at a local carwash.
``That brief carwash experience made me more grateful than ever that I was headed for college,'' she said. ``More importantly, it made me more aware than ever that in a country without choice, a young woman's dreams can die very quickly.''
Le Guin, best-selling author of ``The Left Hand of Darkness'' and many other novels, said she had an abortion as a young woman, and has been a strong supporter of abortion rights ever since. She compared being pregnant and 20 years old in the 1950s to living under fundamentalist Islamic law.
If she hadn't disobeyed the law and had the abortion, Le Guin said, she never would have gone to college or met her husband as the two were sailing on a ship for England as Fulbright scholars.
Both Le Guin and Oberst, as well as other speakers at the banquet, emphasized the precariousness of the nation's abortion laws. For the first time in years, Congress approved a law banning certain types of abortion procedures, they said, and the push to continue weakening abortion rights continues at both the state and national levels.
The biggest concern, they said, is that President Bush will appoint an anti-abortion rights judge to the Supreme Court, which could provide a majority to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Yikes! Shield the children!
Lemme guess . . . Her Highness Oberst is the one without the cap? The one whose been in the sun too long? The one missing a few neurons?
What in the hell kinda name is Ted Kulongoski? Give the poor fella a simple first name and a name from hell for a last one . . . like Sam Smirtezenavelich. He has or had some cruel parents.
Gee what about the choice to keep your knees closed or
if you can't control yourself, using birth control?
But then why bother to be responsible when all you have to do is run down to the nearest murder mill?
How terribly convenient
Ah yes, killing a child is such a moral non-issue anyway...it's not like it's a human being or anything.
Liberals...monsters at the core.
read - "importance of the right to kill their unborn child."
She's right that girls and women who procreated were and are unjustly discriminated against. But the answer to that discrimination is NOT abortion. The answer is to demand equal rights for girls/women who procreate to boys/men who procreate. If boys men are not forced give up their "dreams" when they procreate, then neither should girls/women.
Injustice breeds injustice. A better fight is to fight for equality for girls/women so that they are not treated any differently from men w/ regard to education and opportunity regardless if they have procreated. Injustice toward women was what led us into the abortion quagmire to begin with. She should fight against that.
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