Life after Roe v. Wade

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Life after Roe v. Wade
January 29, 2006

http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/subscribers/news.php?topicid=910

Julie Thomas averts her eyes as she contemplates the future of women’s reproductive rights with a Justice Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.

“I know it’s a when, not an if,” she said of the day that Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion, is no longer the law of the land.

Thomas, who works on women’s issues through a variety of groups and organizations in Bloomington and on the IU campus, helped organize the Jan. 22 rally at City Hall celebrating the Roe decision’s anniversary.

And she warns that the right to choose isn’t the only reproductive right at risk for American women under the “Roberts Court.”

With two Bush/Rove nominees on the Court – Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts – there may well be greater losses in the decades ahead.

full article: http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/subscribers/news.php?topicid=910

[Erika]

1. It's amazing how the GOP are copying after the Taliban

Their main enemy seem to be the women and keeping them subservient to the man.

[ticapnews]

2. Flame on, but that is a recurring theme among religions

Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, Kathleen Parker and the rest ought to read the book of Timothy before writing their columns and spouting off their opinions. Ephesians and Corinthians are also enlightening. Don't even get me started on Deuteronomy or Leviticus...

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."

"Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands in every thing"

"But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man."

[Erika]

4. Yes, religious factions teach women are to be submissive

and silent. The Taliban and the Conservatives are in agreement. Coulter may be in for a crash course in reality about her embracing the extremist far right.

They would tell her life has been wasted because she is neither a wife nor a mother. They would also subject her to many lashes for her immodest dress and speaking against and in front of men.

She's out there jawing without seeing the hell she's endorsing. Dumb -----.

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3. it's our culture which elevates mostly men to these leadership positions

Look at the judges. Bush hasn't been appointing women to high judgeships at the same level as Bill Clinton, and, women lawyers haven't been afforded a decent level of advancement in the legal community either:

From the National Association of Women Judges:


SOME UNFORTUNATE NUMBERS

Gender diversity on the bench is not an issue of too few in the pipeline. A significant pool of indisputably qualified women candidates exists for both the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. Highly distinguished women serve as chief judges of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th, 9th, and 10th Circuits and as chief justices of 17 of the states’ highest courts.

It is not only on the Supreme Court, however, that gains once thought irrevocable now seem more evanescent. As New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye recently observed, “Numbers matter — a lot,” and troubling signs of retrenchment can be seen in the recent erosion of gains made by women in the judiciary over the course of the 1990s. On the federal bench, for example, while 24 percent of judges are women, only 20 percent of President George W. Bush’s confirmed judicial appointees have been women, compared with 29 percent of President Bill Clinton’s.

And while a quarter of state judges are women, they tend to be concentrated in urban areas and in lower courts with limited jurisdiction. In some states, including California and Michigan, their number is increasing. However, early gains are being reversed in other states. Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski has named only one woman in his 20 judicial selections, reversing his five immediate predecessors’ records and driving the percentage of women judges in his state back to its 1988 level. Similarly, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has included only four women in his 25 judicial appointees, threatening, as observed by a Boston Globe columnist, “to recast the judiciary as the white male bastion it once was.”

Of equal concern is the apparently stalled progress of women in many areas of the broader legal community from which judges are selected. Although women now constitute 28.5 percent of all lawyers, almost 50 percent of all law students, and well more than 40 percent of associates in major law firms, women’s progress at the partnership and firm leadership levels has been glacial. Only three women currently lead the nation’s largest law firms, and the percentage of women partners has risen less than 4 percentage points in 10 years, to only 17.3 percent. In legal academia, women’s rate of progress to full professor has been similarly slow-going, with women’s numbers increasing only 5 percent over the past seven years. Seventy-five percent of all tenured law school faculty in the academic year 2004-05 were male.

full report: http://www.nawj.org/

[Erika]

5. I guess men have stuck women into the back seat again

Laura will probably say the back seat is comfortable. She's an enabler to those who wish to keep women down.