Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“We’re still fighting this battle year after year because there are people who hold certain fundamental religious beliefs and are not content to let us have our own,” Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) told Hollywood on the Potomac at NARAL‘s 45th Anniversary dinner at The Washington Hilton, “and have our own access to what we consider to be reproductive health issues. They want to impose them on us and want to use the government to do it, but they’re in the minority. We know it, we know they are in the minority, but they just keep at it year after year.”
Senator Tom Harkin and Kate Michelman
“I like to speak to the fact that women have made progress in this society and their journey for equality,” added Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, “but we’re still in the middle of the story. I feel that each time women make progress in one area, it provokes a backlash on the part of those who really don’t want to see women sharing an equal place with men and they aim at reproductive rights and reproductive health as the place to go after women. So I think that fundamentally, it is about women’s equality, women’s lives and there are just some in the society that cannot bear the idea that women will share equally with men in the scheme of things, so reproductive rights become the vehicle.”
NARAL’s mantra is: “Work to sustain an empowered constituency that uses the political process to guarantee every woman has the right to make personal decisions regarding a full range of reproductive choice.”
Martha Shane
We spoke with Martha Shane, a young filmmaker and co-director and co-producer of After Tiller, a critically acclaimed documentary produced in the wake of the 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller. “We were drawn to this story by just watching the news coverage of Dr. Tiller’s murder and feeling like the news media wasn’t really going to cover this in the way that we might. It was always sort of that a controversial abortion doctor was killed and then a talking point from the right and then a talking point from the pro-choice side and we felt that there were so many interesting factors. He was killed in church and yet he was vilified by the Christian right; he had a history in the military – so, we thought it would be interesting to learn more about him.
President of NARAL Ilyse Hogue and Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
At first we thought about doing a film about Dr. Tiller, but then thought it would be more interesting to go inside the lives of some doctors still doing this work – what their lives were like as the focal point of so much anti-abortion protests. I’m thirty and I hope that young people of my generation are becoming more involved because there has been a lot of attacks on reproductive freedom lately and then I think for us it was talking about an issue in a new way, opening up a new dialouge for our generation.”
“Men for Choice” hosted the after party at Jack Rose nearby. A look back at their first event.
