The Daily Pennsylvanian: Do you feel that this generation holds a different attitude toward abortion rights from those before it?
Gloria Feldt: We now have almost two generations that have grown up with a legal system and a health-care system that provides reproductive rights and access to reproductive care. These are generations that have not known life without choice. Many people don't understand it was only 1965 that we gained the right to get birth control.
I was teaching for Head Start and was involved in the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. My Head Start class was at a Catholic church, and there was a priest who was on the Planned Parenthood board there, and he said, "The people in my parish are poor. I can't feed their children for them. Who am I to tell them they have to have a baby every year? They need to have options."
DP: After the 2004 elections and the debate over moral values, did you notice legislators cutting ties with Planned Parenthood?
GF: Many people said moral values when they meant that they were against the war or they wanted children to have health care.
I might say moral values, but my moral values are not going to be anti-gay or anti-abortion, they're going to be saying women should have a right to choose.
We have our own values, too, and we don't often talk in those terms. I mean seriously, that's a term that the right would like to have to themselves, but really 90 percent of Americans support access to family planning, 85 percent support access to medically accurate sex education and about two-thirds want Roe v. Wade to stay the law of the land.
So I think our moral values are pretty safe and secure, but we have to talk in those terms. I think we have to call reproductive rights human rights, because they are.
DP: If Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is confirmed, how can the legal battle for abortion rights continue?
GF: First of all, it is very important for progressive organizations to fight a big battle around the nomination. Whether he's confirmed or not -- and if it isn't him it will be someone like him -- it's very important to have this discussion.
Pro-choice people need to build political support at the grass-roots level. We are simply going to have to enact legislation to guarantee reproductive rights. We are going to have to make our voices heard much more loudly than we have. We're going to have to be the ones out there on the sidewalk with the picket signs.
-- Ben Marrone
