The Good Old Days? Let’s Not Go There Again

Remember the good old days?

Remember when Americans were decent and honest and hard-working?

When everyone knew right from wrong?

When kids respected their elders and grew up saying “Sir” and “Ma’am”?

When every child was wanted and grew up in a happy, two-parent home?

Oh, hey, hold on there a second.

Were these the same days when African Americans had to ride in the back of the bus?

When parents and teachers routinely slapped the tar out of children for “their own good”?

When women who found themselves pregnant and unable to raise a child risked their lives with illegal abortions?

Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that the drive to bring back the good old days has lately taken on some frightening steam?

In Sacramento, they want to bring back corporal punishment. In Washington, they want to lower the number of out-of-wedlock births by stigmatizing the children, or, should I say, the little bastards? And all across the country a vocal, but increasingly violent, minority is working like crazy to send American women reeling back to the dark ages of illegal abortion.

If you ask me--or anyone whose life was circumscribed by racism, sexism, social class or someone else’s moral code--the good old days are nothing more than a misguided far-right fantasy and, like any compelling fantasy, quite immune to reality.

Antiabortion activists can scream all they want. The reality is, women will never--never--stop having abortions, because unwanted pregnancies are a fact of our lives.

And were, as well, in the good old days.

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Last week, we commemorated the 23rd anniversary of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that changed the lives of American women. The case, of course, is Roe vs. Wade, and it is still under attack, still the subject of some of the most intense debates in American politics. But it remains the law of the land.

Even so, there is not a single major Republican candidate for the presidential nomination who endorses a woman’s right to control her reproductive life. Patrick Buchanan has gone so far as to question whether the bombing of abortion clinics is really any worse an offense than abortion itself.

Even President Clinton, who claims to be a supporter of legal abortion, signed a bill making it illegal for servicewomen and military dependents to obtain abortions at military hospitals overseas. He also signed legislation denying federal employees abortion coverage in their insurance plans.

In California, the new speaker of the Assembly, Curt Pringle, has made it clear that one of his priorities is curtailing abortion rights. Poor women, of course, will suffer first and most, even though the state is constitutionally bound to provide publicly funded abortions as long as it provides other pregnancy services.

And, always, those who complain loudest about abortion are those who most vehemently oppose family planning. The California GOP platform calls for the elimination of the state Office of Family Planning, which has an annual budget of about $70 million.

Any Californian who believes that abortion is a personal, private decision ought to be alarmed. With term limits tossing unprecedented numbers of state Senate and Assembly seats up for grabs, what is now a pro-choice Legislature could easily go the other way in the next elections.

As Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz recently put it: “A lot of people in California don’t get this: A woman’s right to choose is at risk.”

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I graduated from high school the year Roe became law. The year before that, Congress had approved the Equal Rights Amendment, and it seemed only a matter of time before the states would ratify it.

The choices of women would never again be limited the way they’d been for my mother’s generation and generations before her. For those of us on the cusp of adulthood back then, the future stretched before us like a gorgeous, unfurling red carpet.

And we embarked on the journey equipped with these certainties: Our reproductive lives were ours to control, equality was about to be enshrined in the Constitution and we could pursue whatever personal or professional goals we dreamed of.

Of course, it was only a matter of time until the ERA bit the dust. And real life intervened with its bitter lessons about having it all. Our certainties seem kind of naive now.

I don’t take any of it for granted anymore. Too many people out there hankering for their version of the good old days, when life could be hell for everyone else.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.