| Dear NOW Member:
Feminist activists and other progressives are now faced with what could be the scariest prosecution since Susan Smith took action to combat depression in a lake near her home in South Carolina.
This time, anti-progressive forces may seek the death penalty against Andrea Yates, a fascinating woman and mother of five, for dealing with a crippling depression in the best way she knew how.
This intelligent and resourceful woman could be sentenced to death simply for taking a controversial and bold view of "human life."
Deprived of the typical male-oriented weapons of destruction, Yates was forced to improvise a late-term abortion procedure in her own bathtub. This is just the sort of can-do spirit that made this country great.
Yates' choices didn't make it easy. Tricky little monsters that they were, Yates' choices -- post-partum fetuses aged 6 months to 7 years -- only added to Yates' incomprehensibly stressful life by trying to flee the abortion provider (or "mom").
Men still just don't "get it." A home paid for by a man is no place for a woman. Women belong in the Oval Office, on corporate boards, in military fighter planes.
Many are asking: How could Yates' husband be so out of touch? Human rights advocate Rosie O'Donnell may have put it best when she said she felt "overwhelming empathy" for Yates.
And yet, Yates could be sent to prison -- or even the death chamber -- for exercising her right to choose.
The radical right-wing D.A. has acknowledged that he will prosecute Yates for her "crime." With a straight face, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said: "The citizens of Harris County ought to be able to consider the full range of punishment in this case."
These bigoted ravings have no place in a post-feminist society. Let Texas know that they don't have to sink to the level of Iran to be seen as "tough on crime."
As you well know, nothing comes easy to women in America. (The NOW human rights project ranks the United States the most anti-choice nation within the global community!)
Almost unbelievably, right-wing radicals (men!) are not content to place this fascinating woman in prison. They have imposed a gag rule on her tragic ordeal. It is little known, for example, that Yates is:
white,
middle class,
a mother of five so-called "children,"
supported by her husband.
And now the right-wing radical Texas prosecutor wants to help make Yates life even more difficult by punishing her.
Unlike Timothy McVeigh, who allegedly had been sent to war and might have been suffering from alleged "post-traumatic stress syndrome," or Nikolay Soltys, who recently made the difficult decision to terminate the lives of six family members and some might argue was suffering from alleged "provider-stress syndrome," Yates ordeal was nearly incomprehensible.
Year after year for almost a decade, Yates had been forced to endure the burden of being supported by a man. Continued... |