I first met Hillary Rodham in 1974 when she came to teach at the University of Arkansas law school after she had served on John Doar's staff in the US Congress's investigations into the "high crimes and misdemeanors" of President Richard M. Nixon and his gang of Repugnican thugs in the White House.
Nixon resigned in August of that year, and Hillary came to Arkansas to join her then boyfriend and future husband, Bill Clinton.
At that time, I has involved in a very busy ObGyn practice, and it would be several years before I gained the status of "the local abortionist" in Fayetteville, AR. Back then, there was a group of three physicians working in the other group ObGyn practice in town who provided the bulk of abortion care in this part of Arkansas.
I think I might have done three abortions the year I met Hillary. And, much as the "Pro-Life" community would like for one of them to have been for Hillary, I only saw her for routine gyn services.
I was raised to be interested in politics. I don't remember a local township, city, county, state or national political campaign season when my mother and father, along with my grandparents, a significant number of my many aunts and uncles and grown cousins, were not involved in some of the campaigns.
Perhaps the most outstanding memory in my young life occurred when I was 14 years old. We had just moved to the Haynes Special School District in Haynes, AR, where my parents were teaching in a three room school with six grades. My father was the principal and superintendent, overseeing both this "white" school and two little Negro schools in the district, and taught grades 5 and 6. My mother taught the 1st and 2nd grades and we lived about 50 feet in back of the school in the little two bedroom apartment called the "teacherage" which was on one end of the cafeteria. As part of their salary, my parents had the use of a three year old Chevy station wagon that belonged to the school district. With an older brother and sister in college and two children at home, my parents earned just enough to scrap by with the help of food from a large garden and milk from our cow. We were what my friend, the Mississippi born Fayetteville novelist and poet, James Whitehead called "the gentle poor."
After we had lived in Haynes for a few weeks, my father returned from a school board meeting as angry as I ever saw him. He said to my mother as he tore up their contracts, "Get packed, Mat, we're leaving!"
He had been at the school board meeting that evening where he was told by it's president, that they would all be voting for a certain candidate for county sheriff. My father had already promised his vote to a different candidate whom he considered a better choice. When he was informed that his job depended on his "voting right," my father walked out of the meeting held in the Haynes schoolhouse, crossed the small lane to our apartment, and returned carrying the shredded contracts back to the meeting, and said, "You can't fire me. I quit!" And walked out.
My little sister, my mother and I were crying as we packed our few things to leave, having no idea where we were going or how we would get there. A few minutes after my father returned and was helping us pack, a very chastened school board member brought back a new contract for my parents, saying, "Oh, Fess (short in Haynes talk for Professor), we have made a mistake! Please, we want y'all to stay!" My father made him grovel a bit and finally went back to meet with the entire board, who were more than a little in awe at "Fess's" reaction. Indeed, they were "shocked and awed!" My mother and we children went with him and watched and listened, and I learned that night exactly how important, and how powerful is the ballot, and what a force an aroused and inspired electorate truly is. And for as long as we lived there, the board never again opposed something my father thought important.
Before that night, "Fess" had been offered in a slightly derisive tone. After, it was a title of high regard and deep respect.
Anyway, long story short, we are a family who takes our politics seriously.
Before I met Hillary, all the nation had been glued for months to their television sets, watching the congressional hearings. And John Doar was a household name. When I learned Hillary had been on his staff, I had to ask her about it. I spent far too long talking with Hillary that afternoon, but we immediately became good friends, and sometime a few days later, she introduced me and my wife to her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, who was running for Congress. We two couples became fast friends, and Betty and I were two of the small group of friends and relatives invited to attend their wedding.
Hillary and Bill Clinton impressed me then as two of the most intelligent, informed, dedicated, committed and most honorable people I have ever known. And they have done nothing since to disabuse me of that opinion. And now, after the thuggish Repugnican generated "Clinton Scandals" of the 1990's, and the US House's misguided attempt to convict President Clinton of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" I consider them two of the bravest people I have ever known.
As the readers of this diary know, for many years now, I have been a dedicted, and sometimes fierce, supporter of freedom. And given my profession, most especially of Reproductive Freedom, including safe, legal, accessable abortion care.
Three days ago, I met with Hillary at a campaign fundraising event held in Fayetteville, sponsered and attended by many of Hillary's and Bill's oldest friends. At this event, I gave my old friend, Hillary, a note requesting that she help us place a new frame around the abortion debate in this country.
For many years, she and Bill, and many others, have been speaking in support of keeping abortions "safe, legal and rare." And though legal abortion care has continued to be safe for most girls and women, it has been made much less accessable and much more rarely available for the very poor and the very young, often the very women who need that care the most.
I know, because I know Hillary and Bill Clinton, that they never meant abortion care to be rare because it has become much more rarely available in much of the country. They want it to be "rare" because it is rarely needed. Which is, I should think, just what most of us who support Reproductive Freedom desire as well.
I have asked her to do several things. To speak of "abortion care" instead of just saying the much more harsh sounding and seemingly negative single word, "abortion." I asked her to say that she wants abortion care to be "safe, legal, accessable, and rarely needed."
What will it take to make "abortion care rarely needed?" It will take all those social programs that we liberals and progressives support: universal health care; a living wage for working families and if needed, government support for those parents trying to raise and care for their children on a limited income; adequate maternal leave and support for women before and after they have a baby; safe state supported child care for those parents who need access to this; and for our children, real sex education stressing factual information about birth control instead of a radical "abstinance only" fundamentalist religion inspired failed political agenda; accessable government funded birth control as a part of universal health care. And whatever other social support efforts that it really does take for our global village to raise a wanted child, and to prevent the birth of one not wanted and who won't be loved and supported as every child deserves to be loved and supported.
And finally, I want her to say that, unlike TGDSOBGWB - the sad little failure who currently occupies the White House when he is not in Crawford cutting brush - she will gladly sign the Freedom of Choice Act and she will work to overturn the misguided "Partial Birth Abortion Ban" so recently supported by one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever rendered, and will appoint only those candidates for our nation's federal courts and federal prosecutors who will fight to enforce Reproductive Freedom in all its many facets.
I believe this is a winning strategy for every Democratic candidate. And I will oppose any DINO, Democrat-in-name-only, who refuses to take these stands.
As those of us working in this field in the vast middle of this country know, Roe v. Wade doesn't have to be overturned for many girls and women to be returned to the bad old days of the pre-Roe years of my youth. For far too many girls and women in middle America, the promise of Roe v. Wade has become a hollow phrase, seemingly full of sound policy, but signifying nothing, because they haven't the means to gain access to its promise.
Like most Americans, those of us who provide abortion care would like for these services to become more rarely needed, not to become more rare because they are more rarely accessable.
Desperate women will have the abortions they feel that they need even when none of these words, Safe, and Legal, and Care can in anyway, be attached to their abortions. And these desperate girls and women are doing it right now in many of the flyover states that make up this nation's heartland.