That ought to give some idea of the gender feminist generation that came before you.

I suspect the featherheads comment is a poorly phrased frustration with the low turnout in the last election by young women.

My frustration is that people seem to have focused on the relationship between the two generations, rather than on making a concerted effort to figure out how to get those disinterested young women more involved in politics, social issues, and ultimately the shape of their own future.

NOt to site pimp, but I recently saw an article in the local university paper (Daily Texan) that tried to advance the "repealing Roe v. Wade ain't so bad, let the state legislatures work it out" nonsense. My response compiled the states in which I thought that abortion would probably be outlawed. Forget crossing state lines, you'd have to cross entire time zones.

As for the intergenerational warfare, I'm sitting that one the fuck out.

Featherheads?!?
Nice use of a derogatory gendered insult, Katha. I don't think you win many converts by speaking to younger women the same way Torvald spoke to Nora in 'A Doll's House.'

Slight tangent from the Pollitt comment:

If (god help us) Roe is overturned, what is stopping Congress from outlawing abortions on a national level? They have already stepped in to the fray with their terrible "partial birth abortion" legislation. If they can find enough interstate commerce to justify that law, surely they'll have no problem with justifying a total ban, right?

Even if the Supreme Court says, abortion legislation should be left to the states because there is no constitutional right to privacy that encompasses a right to abortion, how is that binding on Congress? Is it because of that whole 10th Amendment thing? But would that be enough to stop a federal law if Congress concocts enough "evidence" of the need for such a law? Am I missing something obvious?

What say you fellow legal minds and feminists?

Thank you, Jessica! I hear complaints about how apathetic my generation is all the time, and I think you're spot on - not only is it patronizing, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of all people, I wouldn't expect that from Katha, who I also love love love.

How many young women want to get involved in a cause that has already labeled them as naive and uncaring?

Or perhaps her choice of language was specifically chosen to galavanize a group not known for their activism. Say something like that around a group of young women and you might end up with some pissed off proto-activists before the words are out of your mouth.

Having worked with NOW and NARAL off and on for the last decade or so, the number of women my age or younger has stayed fairly consistently small (I'm 26). I think Katha's comment, while petty, is relevant and addresses an important issue that we have to face, many young women won't appreciate what they have until it's gone (or severely threatened).

While I'm not certain if Congress could enact a nationwide abortion ban (they'd certainly be fought by a few states, at least), they could definitely ban receiving an abortion in a state which is not your residence, as that's squarely under interstate commerce. So, while the result might not be a total ban fir the entire country, it might entirely prevent many women from receiving abortions.

NOTE: Katha is having problems with Typekey, so she asked me to post this for her.

Thanks as always for posting my column! I think you're misreading it a bit. If you'll look again, you'll see that I did not characterize ALL young women as featherheads -- I characterized as featherheads those young women who think abortion rights are safe etc. I'm sorry to say I've met many such young women, and many others who are squeamish about abortion rights -- they support it, sort of, in the sense they think it should be legal but they basically disapprove of women who actually have abortions and they don't want to think about it. They don't follow abortion politics -- as long as Roe is still standing, they assume all is well-- and they don't choose whom to vote for (if they vote) on the basis of abortion rights.

There are plenty of polls that show declining support for abortion rights among young women--and as one poster noted, the last election, with young women still not turning out all that energetically, suggests too that abortion rights haven't grabbed their attention.

I know many young women who are totally pro-choice, who are activists (like the young women of New York Abortion Action Fund and Haven, to mention two organizations I've worked with and adore). But I would expect even more activism, and more support for activism by those who aren't activie themselves,considering that vastly most abortions are performed on young women. For example, I would expect parental notification/consent to be a huge issue for young women, who were teenagers only yesterday and may have teenage sisters back home. It's kind of funny that it's women my age -- the mothers -- who are most ardently defending the right of their underage daughters to have secret abortions!

One theme that comes up a lot on Feministing is the reluctance of the older generation of feminists to cede power. I'm sure that's true, but if younger women were eager and active in great numbers, wouldn't you expect they would be forming their own organizations by now? I mean, large mass organizations, not wonderful but small ones like Third Wave.

Responding to the Glamour magazine article post, people seemed to feel that young women would respond more positively to "pro-choice" broadly defined (bc, ec, sex ed). To me, that concedes what i am saying: for many young women, the right to an abortion is not something they identify with strongly, for whatever reason--perhaps it has been made too shameful, too much a badge of personal failure-- so abortion rights have to be attached to something more positive, more everyday, less controversial.

i would like very much to be persuaded that, in fact, young women are more committed to abortion rights than they were ten or twenty years ago. Since objectively abortion rights are more at risk now than they were back then, one would hope that would be so. But i don't think it is.

One more point: of course it is true that many older women also take abortion rights for granted. They are featherheads also. But it's natural to be kind of lax about a right you'll never use! The reason it is so curious that young women aren't ALL up in arms about the threat to legal abortion is that they are the ones who get pregnant.

I think there are lots of reasons that young women identify more with an expansive notion of reproductive choice that includes sex ed and birth control. Part of it is that abortion is legal and so we take it for granted. But isn't that, in a funny way, how progress is made? Yes, I know that we need to fight to preserve something that is under attack. But with a long view, I think the "put prevention first" work that situates abortion rights in a broad understanding of women's health is very promising. It's pro-active, and it's about envisioning a world we'd like to see and then working towards it. It's a different strategy but I'm not convinced it is doomed.

If you'll look again, you'll see that I did not characterize ALL young women as featherheads -- I characterized as featherheads those young women who think abortion rights are safe etc. I'm sorry to say I've met many such young women, and many others who are squeamish about abortion rights -- they support it, sort of, in the sense they think it should be legal but they basically disapprove of women who actually have abortions and they don't want to think about it.

For the record, I agree 100% with her. They are featherheads. My generation grew up under an onslaught of propaganda to convince us that women who get abortions are failures. Some women think only "sluts" need abortions, and of course, the slippery definition of what a slut is in our slightly more sexually free times is, "someone who's had two more sex partners than me." Slightly smarter women don't fall for that, but unfortunately I see a lot of women fall for the idea that bringing an unwanted pregnancy to term is the proper punishment for being irresponsible with birth control.

There's a great deal of denial going on in both cases--someone else is always the slut and someone else is always irresponsible. It's easy to gloss over your own mistakes or consider yourself perfectly normal, whatever that means. We're between super-constrained and finally free, I guess. We're free enough that nearly every woman can feel safe defining her own morality and convince herself that her behavior is perfectly moral and responsible (aka, not leading to needing an abortion), but we are still sexist enough that we can believe that women need to be punished for being irresponsible sluts. We just assume those women are not ourselves.

Maybe an ad campaign that says, "No matter what kind of birth control you use or how many partners you've had, if you have sex with a man, you need to have access to abortion," or something. Make it clear that 99% safe isn't 100% safe or something. I dunno, that territory has been ceded to the religious right's anti-sex propaganda, so it's a tough call.

NOTE: This is a message from Katha, as she is still having problems with Typekey.

Putting prevention first is fine, Sara, but not if it's a backdoor way to compromise on abortion rights, or means embracing the anti-choice language of abortion as tragic, wrong, something to be guilty about. No matter how much BC and Ec are used, there will always be a need for abortion.As for taking rights for granted representing progress, sure -- if you actually have those rights and can keep them! Otherwise, you're just kidding yourself.

"That ought to give some idea of the gender feminist generation that came before you."

It's a minor point in this context, Iguana, still: "gender feminist" is a term invented by an anti-feminist, it doesn't really make sense, it's nothing to do with any generational differences between feminists.

To Katha:

"No matter how much BC and Ec are used, there will always be a need for abortion"

right, and to refuse abortion rights is to make abortion available for the rich only; to allow only what we called "Harley Street abortions" (the most expensive private doctors have offices in Harley Street).

I think hammering at the point that laws against abortion in practice mean only against abortions for the poor is a very effective strategy. That's tying it to a "larger" issue while still staying on message about this is a right that cannot be compromised.