Our e-mail boxes are being filled with responses to Gloria Feldt’s June 28 commentary, "Core Issue Missing in Birth-Control War Reports" https://womensenews.org/story/commentary/060628/core-issue-missing-birth-control-war-reports. Here are many of their comments.
Please share your thoughts about Gloria Feldt’s commentary and the other readers’ responses with us, too.
7/14/06–
Thank you to Gloria Feldt for making some important points about the "Contra-Contraception" article in the NY Times. Cristina Page explores these issues even further in the fabulous new book, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex" (Basic Books, 2006). In this heavily researched and documented work, Page makes the compelling case that the anti-abortion movement has become an anti-contraception movement based on old-fashioned notions about the role of women that threaten the basic foundations of modern American life.
Kaye McSpadden, President
Indiana Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
Website: http://www.ircrc.org
6/30/06–
Ms. Gloria Feldt quotes my husband, James Leon Holmes, as proof that opposition to contraception is opposition to women. Ironically, she does not acknowledge that I, his wife and a woman, am the co-author of that article. Interestingly, I am also the primary author. I have found it interesting that the very people who claim to be "pro-woman" are the ones who do not acknowledge that my name is also on the article as a co-author.
This article was published in a Catholic newspaper, with Catholic readers as the intended audience. It states Catholic doctrine. It also affirms the equality of women.
Sincerely,
Susan Holmes
6/29/06–
Thank you for publishing Gloria Feldt’s wonderful article. It is refreshing to hear the "American civil war," abortion rights, framed in its proper perspective, as an attack on the changed role of women in relation to men, families, and society. It is critical that we remember what the lives of most women were like before birth control, before legal abortion, and before the two world wars of the last century, during which women were enfranchised to work and conduct public business. The world of women today would be virtually unrecognizable to women born before 1900. That’s what’s at stake. That’s why we cannot let the self-righteous minority roll back these important rights.
Joseph Feldman, M.A.Ed., L.P.C.
6/29/06–
I was a little disappointed in Gloria Feldt’s article, "Core Issue Missing in Birth-Control War Reports." I would say that a core issue is missing from Feldt’s report – for some women birth control and abortion are life and death issues. The laws restricting abortion currently being crafted in states like Ohio and Louisiana do not offer an option for a woman’s health or life. If these laws go into effect, women will die. It is that simple.
The March for Women’s Lives in April 2004 made an effort to bring this to public attention but the mainstream press simply ignored it, choosing instead to refer to it as an abortion rights protest. Women need to change the terms of the discussion on abortion, contraception, and reproductive health to expose those who want to turn back the clock not just to the 1950s but to the 1900s when death in childbirth was a real danger for all women of childbearing age. This adopts the most extreme position of the Roman Catholic Church. For years the idea of placing the baby’s life above that of the mother was not accepted by most people, including many otherwise devout Catholics. Now it is taken as the accepted view of most anti-reproduction rights advocates.
