MI NOW Foundation Virtual Walk 2008 Web Site!

MI NOW Foundation Virtual Walk 2008

MICHIGAN IS A PRO-CHOICE STATE
Let’s keep it that way!

Dear NOW member -

Our state legislators, including Democratic House Speaker Andy Dillon, are cowering in the face of anti-choice forces that seek to limit a woman's access to reproductive healthcare in Michigan.

Right To Life of Michigan is having their state lobby day on Wednesday, April 23. House members are being pressured by RTL to vote on the unnecessary and wasteful SB 776, which would prohibit abortion methods that were already banned by Congress in 2003 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court a year ago.

Not only is SB 776 unnecessary because so-called “partial-birth” abortion is already banned, it is political pandering at its worst. Speaker Dillon can stop this wasteful and anti-woman legislation by just standing up to anti-choice forces and not letting it reach the House floor, but he needs to hear from us in great numbers to realize that pro-choicers are watching and remember in November.

Tell your representative and Speaker of the House Andy Dillon to stop wasting our tax dollars on an issue designed only to pander to anti-choice forces and attack women in an election year.

Please go to the special Stop SB 776 Web page at www.progressmichigan.org/choice and act now. It is very easy to do. You’ll get a standard letter that you can edit if you want.

Michigan Senate Bill 776 prohibits a rarely used, yet medically necessary abortion method and does not provide an exception to protect a woman’s health. Furthermore, no matter what Michigan law says, this medical method is already outlawed here and across the country.

Tell your representative and Speaker Dillon that rather than wasting our time on divisive unnecessary legislation, we should work together to promote policies that support a woman’s ability to make informed and responsible health care decisions, prevent unintended pregnancies and strengthen families.

Tell your representative and Speaker Dillon to work for progress in Michigan instead of continuing wasteful and divisive antics that put women’s lives and health at risk.

E-mail Your Representative and Speaker Dillon at: www.progressmichigan.org/choice

Mary Pollock
Legislative Vice-President

Mary Pollock has often gone to the mat for us women by testifying against SB1049. SB1049 will make Doctors who perform certain abortion proceedure guilty of 2-year Felony

 

MI NOW Urges vote no on SB 776

Michigan Senate to Consider Banning a Safe and Effective Abortion Procedure

By Kathleen Lavey
Lansing State Journal

Studying, living and working on college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mary Pollock saw the kind of mental and physical damage illegal abortions could inflict.

Now, as legislative vice president for the Michigan chapter of the National Organization for Women, she works to keep abortion legal.

At the age of 16, LeAnn Kirr-mann's parents scheduled an abortion for her. Years later, still grieving, she joined the anti-abortion group Right to Life. She's in Washington, D.C., today to take part in an annual anti-abortion rally

Thirty-four years after the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, Americans remain deeply divided on the issue.

Fifty-three percent of Americans in an October Newsweek poll classified themselves as "pro-choice," while 39 percent put themselves in the "right to life" category. The remaining 8 percent called themselves "neither" or "unsure."

In November, South Dakota voters rejected an abortion ban in the state by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent.

Pollock and Kirrmann are two faces in the sea of supporters on either side of the issue.

Pro-choice activist Mary Pollock

Mary Pollock remembers what it was like in the days before abortion was legal.
And she doesn’t want to go back.

“Some of these women had to go through such horrible experiences,” said Pollock, 62, a state worker. “They had to go to a street corner, call a cab, blindfold themselves and give the cab an envelope with the address in it. They would be taken into places ... hotel rooms and apartments that weren’t clean.”

Pollock graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1967, then went on to the University of Florida.

She learned about birth control pills from her co-workers at a factory where she worked one summer. When she went to get a prescription, she had to use a false name and tell the doctor she was married.

As assistant dean of students at the University of Illinois, she worked with local ministers to provide abortion counseling to young women. She was in charge of a small-loan fund, which she sometimes used to help students pay for abortions. Once, she was called to help a student who suffered a hemorrhage after an abortion she obtained in Puerto Rico.

“When you have to go through this kind of stuff, either with yourself or a friend, you realize you have no control and you are a second-class citizen,” Pollock said.

In her days working with students, Pollock set up sex education classes and lectured about sex and birth control on campus. She still thinks good education about sex and birth control can help prevent abortions.

Even though legal abortion is now 34 years old in the United States, the rights granted by Roe v. Wade have been chipped away in Michigan, Pollock said. State laws require parental notification and a mandatory waiting period.

As legislative vice president for Michigan National Organization for Women, she keeps an eye on what’s going on politically.

“Right now, we have a majority anti-abortion legislature,” she said.

She was heartened when South Dakota voters rejected an abortion ban in their state.

“South Dakota’s vote was just a real boost,” she said.