AT TIMES, I've had a fantasy about my generation as the last brigade parading for reproductive rights under a banner of "Post-Menopausal Women for Choice." After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when 10,000 American women a year died from illegal abortions don't have to imagine a world without choices. We were there. And while we moved on to discussions about hormones and hot flashes, we remained the committed core of prochoice voters.
From time to time, we would sigh to each other about how Gen X and Gen Y took it all for granted. Then we would blush a bit because we actually wanted our daughters to take the freedom to make their own moral and medical decisions as a given, not a struggle. But at the same time, we worried. What if they couldn't imagine losing freedoms until those freedoms were gone?
Now it looks as if the Bush administration's policies have done what we couldn't do. They're mobilizing a new generation.
About 1,600 buses are rolling into Washington for today's "March for Women's Lives." The first such gathering in a dozen years is expected to bring more than a half-million women onto the Mall. More to the point, a third of the marchers are expected to be under 30. Indeed, in a wonderful moment of role reversal, Crystal Lander, the leader of the campus outreach and owner of a T-shirt that reads "This is What a Feminist Looks Like," will be bringing her mother to the elder's first march.
more...
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/04/25/not_just_a_march_on_washington/
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