Like more than 1 million other women and men, I traveled to Washington, D.C. this past Sunday and marched on the Mall as part of the March for Women's Lives, the biggest march on Washington in history. The purpose of the march was to rally women together in opposition of Bush administration policies that are severely limiting women's access to abortions. In fact, until just a few months ago, the march was still named the March for Choice.
The problem, however, is that regardless of the more encompassing title, the march's scope was not terribly issues-inclusive - it focused almost exclusively on issues of choice. To me, reproductive choice is one of the most important rights I have, and I will always continue to fight to obtain access to safe and legal abortions. As a young woman, I clearly have a vested interest in making sure that the right to choice is not chipped away.
There are many women, however, for whom choice is virtually irrelevant - take, for example, women who are not sexually active with men and women who are no longer of childbearing age. Though access to abortions is important to protect women who are raped as well as women who have consensual sex with men, the recent and nearly exclusive attention on issues of choice means that other critical issues are being overlooked in the women's movement.
To force the public to recognize the reality that the right to choose hangs by a thin thread following the passages of the Unborn Victims of Violence and Partial Birth Abortion Acts, women's rights activists needed a large-scale confrontation with the Bush administration. The enormous number of protestors who marched understood that in order to tackle the Bush administration's dealings with choice domestically, they must limit their focus. But what happens when all the marchers leave Washington, D.C.?
After the march, a plethora of issues related to the application of the right to choose still abound, including the reality that to access choice, a woman needs affordable health and reproductive care. For example, what happens to the poor woman who cannot afford an abortion or even access to reproductive health care? Who looks out for the millions of women internationally who cannot obtain access to reproductive rights under Bush's Global Gag Rule? Where is the broad concern over Bush's billion-dollar cuts to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides reproductive services to millions of women and their families?
Perhaps more importantly, there are a variety of issues that are not related to reproductive rights at all that have been largely disregarded in recent years. Women still make 79 cents to the dollar that men make for the same jobs, and this discrepancy is shockingly amplified the more educated a woman is. Nonetheless, pay inequity has yet to become a hot topic, and instead has become one of many issues around which feminists have failed to mobilize.
Problems like domestic violence, discrimination against mothers, escalating rates of eating disorders among young girls and the disproportionate rates of poverty among women are still prevalent, even as they are seen as outdated or not as urgent as other, sexier subjects. Other critical issues for women's equality are also ignored, continuing the historical failure of the women's movement to address the specific issues of LGBT women, women of color and low-income women. Even as many feminists proudly proclaim the women's movement as the one truly inclusive social movement, the issues that we rally behind do not tend to be the ones that are pertinent for all women.
I am an active feminist, and I see choice as a fundamental right for women, one for which I will continue to fight at every prime opportunity. At the same time, I refuse to allow choice to obscure the importance of other issues for women, and I will continue to argue from within the feminist movement for all women to look beyond choice and recognize the diverse attacks on women both from the Bush administration and around the world.
At times it may seem difficult for the women's movement to effect meaningful change by focusing on more than one issue at once, and I have no qualms about coming together at times to confront specific problems. Let us not stop there, though - let us take the momentum we have gained and use it to fight for all women. Marching for women's lives demands no less.
Rachel Marshall '04 is too choked up to say goodbye in her last Herald column.
