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Reproductive Health 2011
A Question of ChoiceAbstract: Freedom and self-determination are under attack by the Christian Right in the United States today. The defense of a woman's right to end an unwanted pregnancy must be part of everyone's larger struggle to protect our civil, political and human rights. Central to the question of a woman's right to choose to have children or not is the tension between our American Enlightenment-democratic traditions of the rights of the individual opposed to intrusive State power. The Catholic Church hierarchy has employed lobbying, picketing of reproductive health clinics and Papal Encyclicals to oppose abortion rights. Fundamentalist Christians, comprising another wing of the religious right, use intimidation tactics, violence, and attempts to induce State domination of reproductive rights. The anti-choice ideology and practice of both the Catholic Church hierarchy and fundamentalist Christians constitute the Christian Right, and highlight the anti-democratic character of their movement.Loss of choice cuts two ways. By giving the government the power to prevent, for example, the choice of abortion, the government also acquires the power to require abortion or more extreme measures if its political "mood" were to shift directions. If today, choice is made illegal and predominantly low income, working-class, and women of color are forced by the State to bear children, the State may, at the same time, or later, also deny certain women, perhaps the very same women, the right to bear children at all. This has already happened in modern historyA memorandum to Adolf Eichmann from Nazi-occupied Poznan, Poland noted that "...all the Jewish women, from whom one could still expect children, should be sterilized so that the Jewish problem may actually be solved completely with this generation." [1] And, from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands we read that:For the remaining Jews and Jewesses the aspired goal is voluntary sterilization which is to be carried out in Amsterdam. In case of refusal, force
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