Another threat to Women’s Rights — the Unborn Victims of Violence Act

There are… Another threat to Women’s Rights — the Unborn Victims of Violence Act

There are numerous threats facing women’s reproductive freedoms in our current political climate. The most recent threat is President Bush’s April 1 signing of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which grants embryos and fetuses — at any stage of development — separate legal rights. It is all part of the right-wing strategy to make women’s bodies and lives less valuable by creating legal personhood for fetuses.

There were four abortion-rights alternatives to this bill, which maintained the increased penalties for criminals who harm pregnant women outlined in the UVVA, but did not grant full legal rights to the embryo and fetus. However, anti-abortion legislators who seek to restrict women’s rights and entangle violence against women with the abortion debate struck all of these alternatives down.

Never before has legislation been enacted that gives the fetus legal rights equal to that of the woman. This is yet another attempt by the Bush administration to undermine women’s rights, and to continue rolling back the rights to health, privacy and freedom that women have fought for decades to protect.

These rights are about more than abortion; they are also about access to healthcare and contraception, including emergency contraception and sex education. We must send a clear message that we will not sit by while anti-abortion policy makers work to take away these rights.

And it is especially important that they hear from us. Students must have a very large and visible presence at the March for Women’s Lives on April 25 in Washington, D.C. By attending this March, we will let policymakers know that our rights matter to us. If we don’t protect our rights now, we will soon face the much harder task of having to win back the freedoms that have been taken away. Join me at the March for Women’s Lives. Visit www.pghmarchforwomenslives.org to reserve your seat on one of the buses leaving from Oakland. Or call (412) 225-4883 for more information.

Arab countries also responsible for Palestinian situation

In Pedja Jurisic’s column on April 9, he makes a cogent argument for positive criticisms of Israel.

No nation is above reproach. Israelis themselves lead the world in their criticism of their government. It was, after all, the Israeli left that created the Palestinian peace camp and the Palestinian human rights watch groups. However, those groups, like Jurisic’s column, are blinded by their own government’s shocking abuses and instead choose to blame the one country that is least culpable in Palestinian suffering.

It is on this point that Jurisic loses all credibility in an otherwise honest piece. The so-called Palestinian refugees are refugees not by Israel’s hand, but by their own Arab brothers whose blood lust caused their flight more than 50 years ago. It is the Arab nations that continue to deny them citizenship and rights, even while they were living for generations in those countries. The majority of the Palestinians were born in the squalor of Arab-built detention camps in Arab countries, kept under armed guard, behind barbed-wire fences, denied even the most modest access to human decency, including the right to emigrate or work.

When Jurisic attacks Israel for its human rights record vis-a-vis the Palestinians, while choosing to ignore the fact that those same Palestinians, prior to Arafat’s dictatorship, enjoyed the highest standards of education, lowest levels of infant mortality and greatest civil liberties of any Palestinian community in the Arab world, he opens his own arguments to serious question.

There is nothing racist about being pro-Palestinian. The majority of Israel’s citizens, in poll after poll, have shown overwhelming bi-partisan support for the creation of a democratic Palestinian state with civil liberties and transparency in government.

However, when you erroneously attack Israel for crimes not committed, while ignoring the very flagrant human rights abuses by Arafat’s brutal dictatorship against his own people — he left off that part of the State Department report; was it because it was much, much longer? — one begins to wonder if Shakespeare was right. Perhaps he doth protest too much.

Aaron Weil

Executive Director Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh