The war on women

At
15, Andrea Lipomi found herself pregnant and — she thought — alone.

            “As a depressed suburban teenager
with very religious parents, I figured the best thing to do would be to take
matters into my own hands,” she says. “So I basically stopped eating for over
two months, hoping that my body couldn’t sustain the life of a fetus.”

            Now 25, Lipomi owes her life, she
says, to her parents and to the US Supreme Court. In 1973, the court legalized
abortion in the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

            “I strongly feel that I would not be
here if that option had not been made available to me,” she says. “I seriously
think I would have committed suicide before I even started to show, honestly.”

            That’s why she will march.

            On April 25, Lipomi will join
hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, DC, for the March for Women’s
Lives. The march is sponsored by the Feminist Majority, the National
Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood.

            “Reproductive freedom is at stake,
more so than at any time since before 1973,” says Shelley Page, regional
manager for marketing and communications with Planned Parenthood of the
Rochester/Syracuse region. “These are times when we need to be sure that the
public understands what’s at stake. This is one way of demonstrating to not
only all of the politicians in Washington, but to the nation as a whole, that
we don’t want to go back to the days before Roe v. Wade.”

            The South Dakota legislature’s vote
to ban abortion in almost every case, the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, John Ashcroft’s
attempt to get his hands on abortion records, and the razor-thin pro-choice
majority on the US Supreme Court are just some of the reasons why, Page says,
the need to defend reproductive rights is greater than ever before.

            “Those kinds of things are popping
up all over the country,” she says. “It’s very scary.”

A similar
march was held in 1992. Approximately 750,000 people showed up. The sponsors of the
upcoming march are aiming for one million.

            “There’s a lot of buzz around this
march around the country,” Page says. “It will be a very major march.”

            The march starts at 10 a.m. on April
25, but there are events — workshops, concerts, lectures — in the
Washington area in the days leading up to the march itself.

            Both Page and Marsha Peone —
president of the local NOW chapter — will be marching with their daughters.

            “I think it’s going to start to plug
her into the bigger picture of what life is like for a lot of women in
America,” says Peone, of her daughter, Tricia, 22. “She has an awareness, but
it’s more intellectual at this point. I think that she’s going to see and meet
people that are going to give her a more personal connection to the issues.”

            Reproductive freedom, Marsha Peone
says, is about women having power and control over their own bodies.

            “I just feel so strongly that women
have the right to determine the course of their own lives,” she says. “We have
the right to be private and safe inside our own skin.”

Lipomi has
never regretted having the abortion, she says. Going through that
experience has given her passion about reproductive rights and, she says, anger
“when government officials and people who biologically can never be in that
situation… call the shots when they have no concept.”

            Page is expecting hundreds
associated with her organization to join the march. Peone expects dozens.

            The Rev. Mike Warren, of the
anti-abortion group Rescue Rochester, says he’s not aware of any counter
protest plans from the local community.

            “I don’t get energized
counter-protesting what I would look at as a death march,” he says. “I think
it’s ironic that they’re marching for women’s reproductive health when so many
little baby girls are killed through legal abortion.”

This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2004.