It's come to AVN.com's attention that some women in the adult industry may have had abortions – and that some may even have had them without their parents' permission, or even knowledge.
Shame, shame!
At least, that's what majorities in both house of Congress would say, now that they've both passed a version of H.R. 748, the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act – in the Senate, it's known as the Child Custody Protection Act – and that President Bush has indicated that he'll sign it once it's placed on his desk.
The only thing preventing that is a procedural move by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who noted that the differences between the House and Senate versions hadn't yet been considered by a Senate committee, and therefore, it was premature for Majority Leader Bill Frist R-Tenn.) to appoint negotiators to a House/Senate conference to iron out the differences between the two bills.
For instance, the House version has no provision for a non-parent to assist the pregnant minor in cases where the girl's father was the cause of the pregnancy.
Recognizing that such a law would prevent non-parents from helping pregnant teens who have abusive or neglectful parents, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) charged, "We're going to sacrifice a lot of girls' lives."
Countered Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), opponents of the bill "want to strip the overwhelming majority of good parents their rightful role and responsibility because of the misbehavior of a few." That's not a philosophy DeMint would carry through to, for instance, consideration of whether every producer in the adult industry should be forced spend millions in recordkeeping for the "misbehavior of a few" who might attempt to shoot minors – not that that's happened in over 15 years.
But DeMint's hypocrisy aside, the purpose behind both bills is clearly to prevent more legal abortions from taking place – as is also the intent of the late-term abortion laws enacted by Congress and several state legislatures last year, all of which have been enjoined from taking effect at least until the U.S. Supreme Court considers the issue next fall, as well as the outright abortion bans passed by several states this year, even with the first such, South Dakota's, currently on hold after a successful petition drive to put the issue on the November ballot.
And then there's the new lawsuit by Sandra Cano, the formerly-pseudonymous plaintiff in Doe v. Bolton, another anti-abortion case that was decided at the same time the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Roe v. Wade.
Seems Cano now claims that she never meant for her case, in which she says she "only sought legal assistance to get a divorce from my husband and to get my children from foster care," but that "abortion never crossed my mind," to "create[] the health exception that led to abortion on demand and partial-birth abortion," she told a Senate committee in 2005. Of course, she's being bankrolled by the Justice Foundation, a "Texas-based pro-life law firm," which also represented Norma McCorvey, the "Roe" of Roe v. Wade, in a similar attempt to get the Supreme Court to reconsider her case. The high court rejected the petition.
It is against that background of high-energy anti-choice activism that Ms. magazine, which in its premier issue in 1972 ran a "petition" of "53 well-known U.S. women [who] declared that they had undergone abortions" even though abortion would not be made legal throughout the U.S. until the following year, to call once again for American women to admit publicly that they themselves have also undergone the procedure.
"At the time of the original Ms. petition," reads a statement on the magazine's website, "illegal abortions were causing untold suffering in the United States, especially for poor women who had to resort to unsafe self-induced or back-alley abortions. Today, in the developing nations each year, approximately 70,000 women and girls die from botched and unsafe abortions and another 500,000 maternal deaths occur. [M]ost of this suffering and loss could be prevented. U.S. international family planning policies contribute to this death toll: first, by conditioning its aid on a global gag rule that prevents medical workers from giving even information on abortion; second, by withholding or providing inadequate funds; and finally, by funding abstinence-only education."
One way to head off this destruction of women's sovereignty over their own bodies, Ms.'s editorial staff feels, is to give Congress and the administration a better idea of the number of women who have taken advantage of the legal abortion process in the 34 years since publication of the original petition.
"It is time to speak out again — in even larger numbers — and to make politicians face their neighbors, influential movers and shakers, and yes, their family members," the new petition reads. "We cannot, must not — for U.S. women and the women of the world — lose the right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion or access to birth control. Just as in 1972, Ms. will send the signed petitions to the White House, members of Congress and state legislators. We will also place the petition online."
As part of an industry where visions of sexual intercourse are a primary attraction for customers, but which knows how to avoid one of the major possible consequences of that intercourse – pregnancy – even though most on-camera depictions do not involve condoms, female adult entertainers may want to share their own stories of how abortions have affected their lives.
They can do that by going to the Ms. Magazine website and telling their stories, in concert with thousands or even millions of other women around the country who understand that a nation which does not allow for a safe, legal abortion process is a nation that dooms more than half its population to sexual servitude at the hands of religious tyrants.
Porn stars: Don't you owe this to your fans, both women and men?
