Two Feminist PACs Endorse Carol Mosley Braun for President

The National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee and the National Women’s Political Caucus both endorsed Carol Moseley Braun’s candidacy for president in a move that really underscores where both groups are.

First, Braun is largely a symbolic candidate who was recruited to run for office in large part to try to peel away minority voters from the Rev. Al Sharpton. Second, like the two groups endorsing here, Braun’s vision of feminism is a creature of the far Left.

NOW president Kim Gandy summed up the current state of the sort of feminism that her group represents, saying,

We are particularly please that out of a field of strong progressive candidates, the strongest feminist candidate turns out to be a woman.

Yes, Braun is such a strong candidate that in a Labor Day weekend poll, she garnered the support of a whopping 2 percent of registered Democrats.

The only genuine surprise here is that neither group wanted to wait to see if Sen. Hillary Clinton might jump into the race.

Source:

2 feminist groups back Moseley Braun. Julia Malone, Cox News Service, August 26, 2003.

Poll: Many voters unable to name Democratic candidates. Greg Wahl-Stephens, Associated Press, September 1, 2003.

Feminists Against Silicone Breast Implants

An interesting example of the hypocrisy of groups like the National Organization for Women is its recent public opposition to the possible re-introduction of silicone breast implants. NOW argues that there is not enough long term data to justify saying that silicone breast implants are safe, but NOW’s real objection seems to be that silicone breast implants are not politically correct enough.

There are plenty of long-term studies of the effects of silicone breast implants in women who had them before the FDA’s temporary ban on the implants — almost all of which found that there simply were no adverse health risks associated with implants. The concerns that implants increased the risk of breast cancer or contributed to chronic diseases of the early 1990s turned out to be simple hysteria.

But nonetheless, NOW President Kim Gandy complaints that the FDA is only reviewing two years wroth of data and, “Two years of data is not going to give you any valid information so that women will know what’s going into their bodies.”

Nonsense. In this case NOW has simply stooped to the level of its anti-abortion opponents who used and continue to use exactly this argument against both oral contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs such as RU-486. In fact when the FDA dragged its feet on approving RU-486, it was Gandy who was whining about excessive bureaucracy and overblown concerns about a drug that had proven safe through decades of use elsewhere in the world. As Gandy put it in a NOW press release,

It’s all too typical that our U.S. bureaucracy would take this important medical advancement for women and make it as difficult as possible for us to take advantage of its full potential.

If only makers of silicone breast implants could find a way to make them have some sort of contraceptive or abortion abilities as well, perhaps they would be politically correct enough for NOW to stop its ridiculous attempt to prevent women from making their own private health choices about implants.

Sources:

Groups oppose allowing silicone breast implants. Lisa Richwine, Reuters, July 21, 2003.

NOW Members Call for FDA Approval of Mifepristone (RU-486) for Abortion, Cancer and Other Treatments. Press Release, National Organization for Women, Summer 2000.

Is Providing Fertility Information A “Scare Campaign”?

Marjie Lundstrom wrote an op-ed a couple months ago about an odd effort by some feminists to restrict information about female reproductive health. They objected to an ad campaign sponsored by the American Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to inform women about the difficulty in getting pregnant in their late 30s and 40s.

With text like, “Advancing age decreases your decreases your ability to have children,” the ad campaign was motivated by the high profile media cases of women who successfully conceive and bear children at relatively late ages. Although such stories seem rather common these days, the reality, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is that the odds of becoming pregnant in any given month drop to 20 percent for women over 30 and a mere 5 percent for women over 40.

As Pamela Madsen of the American Infertility Association told Lundstrom, “I have to speak to women every day in their late 30s and early 40s whose biological clock has pretty much tickered out, and they’re asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?'”

Thanks to technological advances, having children is possible now even for women 45 and up to have children, but usually only for people who can afford expensive fertility treatments and/or donated eggs.

The National Organization for Women was not pleased by the campaign. In a Newsweek article, NOW president Kim Gandy bizarrely ridiculed the idea that women could choose when to have children. According to Gandy,

The idea that you can choose what age you’ll be to have your children is a ludicrous proposition for most women, as though you can simply snap your fingers and say, “OK, I’m the right age,” and then have all the accouterments magically appear — the stable relationship, financial stability, life stability.

That is a very weird view of parenthood. Few people I know who are parents (including my wife and I) were foolish enough to wait until their lives were ideal before having children.

Source:

Should You Have Your Baby Now?. Claudia Kalb, Newsweek, August 13, 2001.

Fertility education is offending feminists. Marjie Lundstrom, Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, August 17, 2001.

NOW Elects New President

In June the National Organization for women elected executive vice president Kim Gandy to take over the organization for outgoing president Patricia Ireland. The change at the top of NOW is unlikely to mean very little change for the direction of NOW as Gandy is definitely from the same mould as Ireland.

National Review Online recent ran a brief profile of Gandy including some interesting quotes. Like many of NOW’s ilk, Gandy believes that feminism and pro-abortion politics are largely one and the same thing,

To say you’re a feminist and to say you’re anti-choice is definitely a contradiction. They focus all their attention on this little bit of tissue in the womb, and ignore all the tissue surrounding it.

Not that the father of that bit of tissue counts either. When Congress was proposing to give money to nonprofits to encourage men to marry their pregnant partners Gandy said, “I think promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself is misguided.”

In fact Gandy slammed the a widely circulated statement by The Marriage Movement which said, among other things, that,

Nostalgia for the high hopes of the 1970s should not blind us to the hard truths discovered over the past thirty years: When marriages fail, children suffer. For many, the suffering continues for years. For some, it never ends. Children suffer when marriages between parents do not take place, when parents divorce, and when spouses fail to create a “good-enough” family bond. We recognize that there are abusive marriages that should end in separation or divorce. We firmly believe that every family raising children deserves respect and support. Yet at the same time, we cannot forget that not every family form is equally likely to protect children’s well-being.

Gandy simply kicked in her boilerplate anti-marriage messages saying, “The marriage movement is giving women the message that a bad husband and father is better than none at all. Single moms are being demonized. NOW is committed to exposing and organizing this deliberate return to the days of unchallenged male control.”

Apparently Gandy missed the paragraph in the statement that begins, “Supporting marriage does not require punishing single parents or their children. The Marriage Movement is a movement for a better marriage culture, not a movement of the smug marrieds for the smug marrieds. Many of us in the marriage movement are single parents or the children of single parents. We know firsthand how children suffer and parents struggle when marriages fail.”

But NOW long ago gave up any pretense of even a small sliver of objectivity or of rationally approaching complex social issues. Like others in the organization, Gandy campaigned for Al Gore and appeared on a number of talk shows defending the vice president. An appearance on CNN highlighted her (and NOW’s) love of extreme scare tactics. Gandy asked,

Why are elderly people eating dog food? Because our Social Security system doesn’t take into account all the years of unpaid caregiving that they contributed to society.

What a bizarre statement giving the huge redistribution of income from the young to the elderly that Social Security has created. I’d be ashamed to go on national television and use such an obvious scare tactic, but apparently that’s all in a day’s work for a NOW president.

Source:

NOW’s new gal. Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review Online, July 2, 2001.

The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles. The Marriage Movement, 2000.