Posted on

Show 417: An Abortion Rights Special – The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

An Abortion Rights Special – The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Audio here!

January 22, 2013 will mark the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion. Yet at no time in the last forty years has abortion been more stigmatized, more dangerous to provide, or more difficult to access. 97% of rural counties do not have an abortion provider. In 2011 there were 92 restrictions passed on abortion under Obama – almost three times the previous record which was set under George W. Bush!

Join Sunsara Taylor for a special episode of Equal Time for Freethought as we speak with and honor a woman who has been providing abortions since even before Roe v. Wade, as we talk to two young women who will “speak out” about their own abortions, and as we collectively grapple with what it will take to turn the tide.

Merle Hoffman is a pioneer in women’s health care since 1971, a staunch defender of abortion rights, an untiring activist and writer around feminist and progressive issues. Hoffman is the Founder, President and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities, and the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On The Issues Magazine.

Donna and Rebel are two of the millions and millions of women throughout this country and around the world who have had abortions and feel just fine about it. They will tell their own stories of why they wanted the abortion, what it was like, and why they think it is so important for other women to tell their abortion stories as part of lifting the stigma and shame off this necessary medical procedure.

Posted on

Show 389: Merle Hoffman – Abortion & Women’s Reproductive Rights

Merle Hoffman – Abortion & Women’s Reproductive Rights

Audio here!

This Saturday on ETFF, Sunsara Taylor will be speaking with Merle Hoffman about her new memoir, “The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom.”

In 1971 – two years before the Roe V. Wade decision which legalized abortion nationally – Merle Hoffman founded Choices, and abortion clinic in NY. As a medical provider, she pioneered Patient Power, encouraging women to participate in their own health care decisions. Whether addressing the murder of abortion providers like Dr. George Tiller, or challenging women to understand and explore their own power over their bodies and the language used to wield such power, Merle Hoffman has been on the front lines of the feminist movement – a fierce warrior in the battle for choice.

Posted on

Show 344: The Morality of Abortion…

The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Would Force Women to Bear Children Against Their Will.

Audio here!

For the 38th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, join Sunsara Taylor for a special hour of Equal Time for Free Thought celebrating the right to abortion, celebrating the doctors and health care providers who risk their lives every day to provide women access to this essential right, and to examine the state of abortion rights today.

The hour will begin with Dr. Leroy Carhart, one of the few doctors left who provides second trimester abortions.  After the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in 2009, Dr. Carhart stepped out even further – and became targeted by the anti-choice fascists as “enemy # 1” – by declaring that he will continue to serve the women who need abortions in his area.  Further, he has expanded his practice to Baltimore and is working to train more doctors in later term abortion services.

Then, the show will feature a three way conversation between:

Merle Hoffman, the President and Founder of Choices Women’s Medical Center and the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of On the Issues Magazine.  She has been on the front lines providing abortions since 1971 and an outspoken activist and women’s rights advocate.

Debra Sweet, the National Director of World Can’t Wait.  She was central to organizing clinic defense against Operation Rescue across the country throughout the 90’s and continues to expose and mobilize against the attacks on women’s right to abortion and the providers who serve them.

Carole Joffe, author of “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars: The Cost of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us,” as well as, “Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe V. Wade.”

Together, we will look back to the days before abortion was legal, examine the changing moral discourse surrounding abortion, confront the full scope of the danger now posed to women who so desperately need this right, and celebrate – and draw inspiration from – those who have committed themselves to fighting to protect and expand abortion access.

Posted on

Show 320: Abortion via Racism

Black Women Committing “Womb Lynchings”!?  The Latest LIES from the Anti-Abortion Fundamentalists.

Audio here!

Across Atlanta, ominous billboard ads have appeared with the face of a young Black child and the words, “Endangered Species.”  But rather than objecting to the massive incarceration of Black youth or the rampant police brutality and abuse that confronts them… rather than challenging the decaying inner city school systems or the massive transfer of wealth through foreclosure out of Black families… these ads are targeting Black women!  They are religiously motivated ads that are seeking to equate Black women who choose abortion to the white supremacist slave-owners and lynchers of U.S. history.  They call abortion by Black women, “womb lynchings.”

Continue reading “Show 320: Abortion via Racism”

Posted on

Show 314: Dispatches from the Abortion Wars

Dispatches from the Abortion Wars w/ Carole Joffe

Audio here!

Sunsara Taylor will talk with Carole Joffe about the parallels between today’s stigma and restricted access to abortion with the period before it was made legal and explore some of the most chilling recent assaults on women’s access to abortion, from the assassination of Dr. George Tiller to the criminalization of miscarriages in Utah to the recent passage of health care to the billboards campaign in Atlanta to (dishonestly) portray abortion as genocide of Black children.

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.  She is the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Cost of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us.  She is also the author of Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe V. Wade.  She has closely followed the abortion wars from before abortion was legal through the passage of Roe V. Wade in 1973 to the rise of anti-abortion fanaticism and then the escalation of terror and assassination of abortion doctors down to today with the passage of parental notification laws, mandatory waiting periods, threats to providers, medical lies which doctors are mandated by law to tell their patients, fake clinics, and numerous other assaults on abortion access.

Posted on

Show 285b: “Abortion – the Debate That Won’t Go Away” II

In the Aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s Assassination: Abortion, Morality and the Liberation of Women

Audio here!

When a hero of women is hunted, demonized and finally cut down for saving the lives and the quality of life of women everywhere, it is women as a whole who have been violently assaulted.  And a society that does not rise up in massive repudiation against this is a society that accepts as normal the degradation, subjugation, shaming and blaming of half of humanity.

This Sunday, Equal Time for Freethought will run a second segment on the question of abortion in the aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s assassination.  Sunsara Taylor will speak with Susan Wicklund, author of ‘This Common Secret: My Journey As an Abortion Doctor.‘

Susan Wicklund, like Dr. Tiller, has been stalked, blockaded, harassed and assaulted for decades for her continued determination to provide safe abortions for women who need them.  She attended Dr. George Tiller‘s funeral along with other colleagues from around the country and will join Equal Time for Freethought to discuss why her work is so central to women’s ability to live full and equal lives.  She will discuss the atmosphere surrounding abortion providers in the aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s murder.

Posted on

Show 285a: Abortion: The Debate that won’t go Away (Call-In Special)

“Abortion – the Debate That Won’t Go Away” (Call-In Special)

Audio here!

Events in the past two months have made it clear that despite it being thirty six years after Roe v Wade, the question of abortion continues to be as controversial as ever. On Sunday May 17th, President Obama suggested that we draft “a sensible conscience clause” presumably giving anti-abortion health care providers the right to refuse to perform an abortion. On May 31st, abortion provider George Tiller was shot dead while attending church.  On May 15th, a gallop poll found that 51 percent of those questioned call themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion.  On April 19 and 26th, our own WBAI featured two programs during which explicitly anti-abortion views were offered both by the guest and the producer as well. This Sunday ETFF will be taking your calls as we examine abortion, the debate that won’t go away.

Posted on

Show 259: Dagmar Herzog – Sex in Crisis

Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics

Audio Here!

From the Publisher:

“The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true – have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no. Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It’s 1950s redux. Politicians – including many Democrats – insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a “sex education” curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.

“The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex – not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America – a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of “hot monogamy” – for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.”

Continue reading “Show 259: Dagmar Herzog – Sex in Crisis”

Posted on

Show 230b: Dr. Susan Wicklund – “Women’s Reproduction, Christian Fascism, and Women’s Emancipation: The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Want to Take it Away”

“Women’s Reproduction, Christian Fascism, and Women’s Emancipation: The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Want to Take it Away, Pt. II”

Audio here!

As the 35th anniversary of Roe V. Wade approaches, it is appropriate to take stock at the degree to which the rise of Christian fundamentalism in American politics and culture has brought with it an unprecedented assault on the most fundamental rights of women.

This week Sunsara interviews Dr. Susan Wicklund, whose new book, This Common Secret, details the horrific experiences of women whom underwent illegal abortions which has motivated her to become an abortion provider, her many years of care for women, and the threats and dangers she has had to confront to do her liberating work.

Posted on

Show 230a: Cristina Page – “Women’s Reproduction, Christian Fascism, and Women’s Emancipation: The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Want to Take it Away”

“Women’s Reproduction, Christian Fascism, and Women’s Emancipation: The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Want to Take it Away.”

Part 1 of a two-week special hosted by Sunsara Taylor!

Audio here!

As the 35th anniversary of Roe V. Wade approaches, it is appropriate to take stock at the degree to which the rise of Christian fundamentalism in American politics and culture has brought with it an unprecedented assault on the most fundamental rights of women.

Access to abortion is out of reach for many poor and rural women, abortion providers are still under constant physical – and increasingly, legal – threat, and the Supreme Court – with their decision to uphold the so-called “Partial Birth Abortion Ban” – has begun the process of criminalizing abortion. A growing number of pharmacists are refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, the life-endangering “abstinence-only” programs are being pushed onto our school children by Democrats and Republicans alike, and “Purity Balls” where young girls pledge their virginity (and receive a ring) to their fathers until they get married, are spreading like wildfire across the country.
Continue reading “Show 230a: Cristina Page – “Women’s Reproduction, Christian Fascism, and Women’s Emancipation: The Morality of Abortion and the Immorality of Those Who Want to Take it Away””