Women's Movement Energized at National Meet

By Susan Webb
People's World
July 7 2010

http://www.peoplesworld.org/women-s-movement-energized-at-national-meet/

BOSTON

Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization
for Women, issued a three-point "charge" to more than
300 activists gathered here for the group's national
conference over the July 4 weekend: Beat back the new
attacks on Social Security - it's a women's issue.
Repeal the anti-abortion Hyde amendment. Elect women to
public office.

"We're facing enormous challenges," O'Neill told the
participants.

She summed up the anger widely expressed here over new
abortion restrictions included in the health reform law
enacted earlier this year. They expand on the 1976 Hyde
amendment prohibiting federal funding for abortions.

Although speakers welcomed the health reform law as a
step in the right direction, the new restrictions make
it so cumbersome for insurance companies to provide
coverage for abortion that, O'Neill predicted, within
five to 10 years they won't bother. She warned that
this is not the end of the religious right-wing agenda
- we can expect next an attack on birth control, and on
maternity care. To let lawmakers know "it's not ok to
attack women's access to health care," she said, it's
necessary to fight to repeal the Hyde amendment.

In a particularly compelling address, Nebraska doctor
Leroy Carhart related harrowing stories of women who
have come to him in desperation for a late-term
abortion because the growing thicket of restrictions
blocked early termination of very problematic
pregnancies. In several cases the fetuses had profound
abnormalities. Some of the women were teenagers
contemplating suicide. Carhart was a colleague of Dr.
George Tiller, who was killed by an anti-abortion
fanatic because Tiller provided late-term abortions.
Carhart's farm was burned a few years ago, killing 17
horses and other animals. "Abortion is a matter of the
heart," Carhart said. "I trust women to know when is
the right time to bring a child into this world."

O'Neill emphasized that the "fiscal responsibility and
reform" commission created by President Obama poses a
"serious economic threat" to women, with its Democratic
and Republican co-chairs targeting Social Security for
cuts. NOW's Jan Erickson told a packed workshop on the
issue that Social Security is "absolutely critical for
women," providing the sole income for millions of older
women. The cause of the federal deficit, speakers
charged, is not Social Security but unfunded "wars of
choice" in Iraq and Afghanistan, tax cuts for the
super-rich, and financial deregulation.

Lois Herr, running to unseat Republican Joe Pitts in
Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District, made a
fiery speech in a plenary session on electing women.
Pitts was the co-author with Michigan Democrat Bart
Stupak of the abortion restrictions added to the health
reform bill. Herr called Pitts a "poster child for what
the far right is trying to do to us. ... They want to
control almost everything we do with our bodies, but
they don't want to control the rich," she said. It's
not just abortion, she warned. "They're going to be
after affirmative action too."

"This election we have to be really mad," Herr said.
"We have to send a message to the right wing." She
asked the audience, "Will you go home and work to make
that happen?"

Speakers stressed the need for more women to run for
office. But they emphatically rejected Republican
efforts to "co-opt" feminism for a right-wing agenda
with the likes of Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina, the
California Senate candidate.

Speaking at a floor microphone, Trudy Mason, a New York
Democratic state committeewoman, said the women's
movement should work to get feminists to run for
office, in contrast to candidates who are "just
physiologically women" but do not represent women's
interests.

Addressing a plenary session titled "Lifting Every
Voice: Women of Color and Empowerment," Irasema Garza,
who heads Legal Momentum, a women's legal defense fund,
issued a passionate appeal for the women's movement to
"advocate on behalf of poor women, working women,
marginalized women." Garza, a former Labor Department
and AFSCME official, said 70 percent of low-wage
workers are women, and immigrant women are "at the
bottom." Among the millions of undocumented immigrants
in the U.S., approximately 4.1 million are women,
"suffering in silence," she said. "If we're not the
voice of these women, who else will be?"

The 342 participants ranged from gray-haired to 20-
somethings, and spanned a wide range of interests, as
shown in workshop topics covering the beauty industry,
alternative bodies and identities, midwives and birth,
culture and race. The organization now has two Spanish-
speaking chapters and says it looks forward to more.

Three young women from the Boston chapter illustrated
the breadth of interests here. Panayiota Bertzikis, 28,
runs the Military Rape Crisis Center in Cambridge,
Mass. She became involved after being a victim of
sexual trauma in the Coast Guard, where she served for
two years. In May, Bertizikis received an Unsung
Heroines of Massachusetts 2010 award from the
Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women. Amanda
Regan, 24, is interested in pay equity. She is between
jobs after working for several years in the railroad
industry, first as a cleaner and then as a railroad
engineer. Althea Sellars, 20, is a student at UMass
Lowell interested in environmental health and
comprehensive sex education in high schools.

Their quiet confidence and enthusiasm indicated a
bright future for the women's movement.

_____________________________________________

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