The following talk was given at a rally protesting Roe v. Wade at the State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin, on Jan. 18, 1986. It was published in Sisterlife, Winter 1985[-86].

Why We Are Here

Mary Meehan

We are here today because abortion involves the issue of judicial tyranny. Of all the bad decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, The Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions were the worst.

Americans with a short historical memory still view the Court as a guardian of human rights. But we--remembering Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and other bad decisions--know that the Court has often left the weak at the mercy of the strong. In the nineteenth century, it supported the slaveholders against the slaves, then the segregationists against the former slaves. In the early twentieth century it supported corporations against labor unions. Today it supports the abortion industry against the unborn.

We are also here because abortion is a women's issue. It is women who often are lied to about fetal development and fetal pain and about the physical and psychological complications of abortion. It is women who discover that legalized abortion enabled many of the back-alley butchers to move up front.

We are here because abortion is also a men's issue....One-half of the parents involved in abortion are male. Some of them urge their wives or girlfriends to have abortions; but others try, without success, to save the lives of their children.

The courts have held that fathers have no legal right to prevent the abortion of their children. Some women even suggest that because men cannot become pregnant, they have no right to an opinion on abortion (unless, of course, they happen to be Supreme Court justices who support abortion).

Suggesting that men should not be involved in the abortion issue seems to me mistaken and--if I may say so--rather sexist.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, when many women protested the war in Vietnam--and I was one of them--no one told us that because we were women, not subject to the draft and not asked to carry guns, we had no right to march and picket and lobby against the war.

No matter who is in the trenches or on the front lines--or on the operating table--the life-and-death issues affect all of us. All of us have a right, indeed an obligation, to save human lives.

We are here today, finally, because abortion is an issue of war and peace. We are trying to end the war against the unborn, a war of curette and suction machine, a war whose soldiers are immune from attack by their victims, yet seem to burn out rather quickly. Several years ago, a Chicago obstetrician told a reporter that on days when he performs abortions, "I come home angry. It's a nasty, dirty, yukky thing and I always come home angry...I've become very good at it. I've become one hell of an abortionist. But it's not something I tell my kids about."

We are urging this weary soldier and all his comrades to lay down their arms, to use their medical skills to save lives--not to take them. We are trying to make peace between doctors and children, between parents and children, between women and men.

I salute all of you who are working so hard to save lives here and throughout Wisconsin. Peace be with you and with all you're trying to save. One day, we hope, peace will be with the abortionists, with NARAL and NOW and Planned Parenthood--when they have laid down their arms and joined the ranks of the peacemakers.