Planned Parenthood at the Clark County Fair

This weekend I took a shift at the Planned Parenthood booth and a shift at the Democrats booth at the Clark County Fair in Vancouver, WA. Although we are a suburb of Portland, OR, as you go north in the county we get pretty conservative (and pretty obese). These are the folks that come to the annual Fair.

This was the first year we've been at the Fair (Right to Life has had a very graphic booth for years, complete with various sizes of fetus dolls in tiny cradles) and we were there to gather signatures for a petition we're passing along to the Senate to support Roe v Wade in their Supreme Court confirmations.

We stood by our table and asked passersby, "Are you pro-choice?" If they said yes we asked them to sign, if they indicated no, we ignored them.

For the people who said no (some more vehemently than others) it was clear that this was for them a defining issue on how they vote. I got into conversation with several, and even if they disagreed with Bush on the war, they supported him because of his so-called "pro-life" stance.

And as the woman at Planned Parenthoood said in our training, "They are no more likely to change their minds about being pro-life than you are to change yours about being pro-choice."

We've got to find some way to reframe this issue to counteract the complete programming that the religious right has done on these robots.

I got a couple of responses to this report when I posted it on DailyKos

1. fromVirginiaBelle: Easily Done, she says.

Don't ask them to change their belief. Ask them to make a difference. The number of abortions went down during the Clinton administration and up to record levels during the first Bush administration, and while I have not seen the numbers I can bet it went up for this administration as well. You know why?

Because the economy was bad, people didn't have health care, or day care, or jobs with benefits that would make them feel that they could take care of and raise a child.

If you want to decrease the number of abortions in a practical way that is much more likely than overturning Roe v. Wade, overturn the social structures that have made the world unfriendly to poor single mothers. Make the world a place where women feel comfortable bringing children into the world. Offer them a support system. And the number of abortions will go down. And that's what Democrats do better than Republicans.

2. ChicagoDem says: Infant Mortality.

Because of Republican policies, our infant mortality is now the highest in the developed world. At this point a larger proportion of babies die in the United States of America than in the People's Republic of Cuba.

Cutting maternal and child health programs kills babies. Making healthcare for poor mothers more expensive kills babies. Restricting access to contraception promotes abortion-- which they see as killing babies. Refusing to regulate environmental chemicals kills babies. Sending kids to war tends to kill them too...

One party gives women the choice to safely terminate their pregnancy if they feel they need to. The other party actively kills babies. I'd say that's a pretty good reframing.