> Jacob wrote:
> >The abortion rights movement is clearly aware of the need to build a
> >membership organization, thus their extensive use of direct mail, and
their
> >web presence.
>
> Jacob, these are great questions and I'm glad you brought them up. I also
> receive the direct mailings from NARAL and other groups that you
> mention. I put their stickers all around my office for the benefit of
> those who enter... But still aren't these mailings
> sent to us a little like "sending coal to Newcastle" as my English
maternal
> grandparents would say.
>
> What about the poor and young women (and men) who don't get on these
> mailing lists ...who are not on college campuses...who don't vote...who
> for the most part are not even registered to vote? How can NARAL and
other
> groups reach those people?
Maybe part of it has to do with public complacency. Abortion has been legal in the US for nearly 30 years, so few people under the age of about 50 have any personal experience of how awful the pre-Roe v. Wade regime was. There's only a fading memory of the "septic wards" once found in all big-city hospitals, where many women died of the after-effects of botched illegal abortions. (These places were compassionately referred to by hospital staff as "septic tanks.") Despite all of the hue and cry, abortion has remained legal, so folks don't feel a very strong need to defend this right. It's not that NARAL and other groups don't try, but they only manage to mobilize a minority of politically conscious people.
If the right ever gets its way and abortion is criminalized again, if the septic wards make a comeback and many women learn what it's like to try to obtain an illegal abortion, a not-uncommon experience before 1973, that will change very quickly.
For an illuminating historical perspective, see Leslie J. Reagan, _When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867 - 1973_ (U. of California Press, 1997).
Jacob Conrad