On a fall day in 2000, George W. Bush was hard at work on the presidential campaign trail. He spoke to a crowd gathered in La Crosse, Wisc. on the topic of family values: “Families is where our nation finds hope,” Bush maintained, “where wings take dream.” The president’s soaring rhetoric is especially pertinent today, almost three years later, as American families face some of the highest unemployment rates and wage differentials in decades. Whatever he meant to say, it’s hard to imagine Bush was really contemplating a dreamy future for American families.

While Dubya signed into law the ban on “partial-birth” abortion this week, I found myself repeating the president’s words. There is a photograph of Bush posted on the National Abortion Rights Action League website; nine other white, male colleagues circle around him like a big, happy, arch-conservative family, and Dubya’s grinning like it’s Christmas. This photograph paired with Bush’s stirring quote brings home the dreariness of our current political situation.

Silly me, despite the dire warnings from pro-choice spokespersons about how the “partial-birth” abortion ban tears at the fabric of Roe v. Wade, I wasn’t too worried about the new legislation. I knew that “partial-birth” abortions were pretty rare, and so it all seemed like a hollow victory for the pro-life lobby. That was until I read the fine print. There is one exception built into the ban—doctors are allowed to perform the operation if the pregnancy puts the woman’s life in danger (pro-life legislators can be so generous sometimes). But that’s where the exception ends: if the woman’s health will be compromised by the pregnancy, the abortion is still illegal.

You can almost imagine Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. clenching his fist in triumph when that exception was taken away, signaling a chilling disregard for the health of a pregnant woman. The Senate’s only M.D. must be pleased to do his part to ensure women will be more unhealthy and unready for motherhood.

Bill Frist and his geeky little friend, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. are also partly responsible for Bush’s nomination of three new rabidly conservative judicial nominees this week. Although the Bush administration doesn’t dare claim openly it wants to tear down Roe, its judicial nominees aren’t afraid to say so out loud. One of them, Carolyn Kuhl, advocated for Roe v. Wade’s devastation while in the Reagan administration. (As my dad used to say about irresponsible drivers when he drove me to school during rush hour: “They’re out there, Beccah, they’re out there.”)

I have to admit, just as I was pretty clueless when it came to the more serious implications of the “partial-birth” ban, I also came relatively late to the realization that a woman’s right to an accessible, affordable abortion is no retro issue. The reality is the “right to choose” doesn’t even exist yet for large demographics of poor and minority women. According to recent data published by the Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 87 percent of U.S. counties had no abortion provider in 2000. Consider this along with the fact that four out of every ten unplanned pregnancies result in unwanted births, and it becomes clear that there’s a serious disconnect between “choice” in rhetoric and in practice. According to the study, abortion is one of the “most common surgical procedures in the U.S.” Therefore, more abortion providers are needed in more areas of the country so that “choice” can be truly accessible to all.

The outcome is the worst kind of trickle-down rights: middle- and upper-class women are educated about contraceptives and have access to abortion providers. As a result, not only do they have fewer unplanned pregnancies, but when such pregnancies arise, they are capable of terminating them easily. Little education about contraceptives and limited access to providers means the reverse is true for women in lower income brackets. To be sure, despite the lack of access, women in poor economic circumstances still contribute to a disproportionate amount of all abortion procedures. But those percentages do not demonstrate the difficulties the women faced, or the huge number of unwanted pregnancies by low-income mothers that were carried to term instead. The difficulties associated with access relate specifically to early abortions, which may explain why there is still a need for safe and legal partial-birth abortions: according to the same study I cited earlier, “Nearly half (48 percent) of women who had late abortions attributed their delay to ‘difficulty making arrangements for the procedure’.” Whether it’s lack of money, transportation, child care or paternalistic laws that force young women to gain parental consent (some form of parental consent is required in 32 states), women might as well have no legal right to an abortion when it isn’t accessible to them. These kinds of roadblocks wouldn’t faze most Harvard students, but to many American women they can mean the difference between having their life to themselves, and being forced to take on the full responsibility of an unwanted child.

Unfortunately, part of the blame for this dilemma of access lies with the pro-choice lobby. The classic call for “choice,” or even “reproductive rights,” doesn’t adequately respond to the problem. We may fight to protect the right to choose, but this doesn’t mean we help women act on that choice. Pro-choice rhetoric usually centers on a woman’s control over her body, and what’s strange about this line of argument is that it calls upon our most conservative fears about state control and the power-hungry men in Washington. This is usually Pat Buchanan’s line, but this time we use it for feminist arguments. Weird, right?

Even weirder is that we’ve let this conservative rhetoric take over what should be a much more prominent concern about the right of every woman, no matter her income level, to have access to abortion providers. Let’s move the debate away from tired “choice” rhetoric, and examine the reality of women’s agency in the U.S. For now at least, abortion is still safe and legal, but it’s not even an option for many women. Forget the “partial-birth” ban; we should have been up in arms decades ago.

Beccah G. Watson ’04 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.