While it is heartening to have a male supporter of women’s rights in the Portland Press Herald Editorial Page Editor Greg Kesich’s commentary of Sept. 30 (“Abortion foes too young to recall tragedies of illegal procedures”), he gives too much credit to present-day abortion opponents’ youth, as an easy pass, to being too young to remember horrific back alley abortions. (One doesn’t have to have been alive during slavery to oppose enslavement, or to the Holocaust during WWII to stand against anti-Semitism – or any other historical human rights issue.)

We need to call it what it is: The Republican and tea party “War-on-Women” (WOW).

They are more than willing to even shut down the United States government in order to deny women services from Planned Parenthood. But this is not a new phenomenon.

I remember the years before Roe vs. Wade when a Maine woman had to travel out of state to pay cash (if she could even afford it) for a legal procedure; when a coat hanger was the symbol of the Pro-Choice movement; when at a Bowdoin College forum, Florynce Kennedy, a feminist pro-choice advocate and lawyer, said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

The private, personal decision about whether or not to have an abortion needs to continue to be made in confidence between a woman and her physician. Republicans and tea party recalcitrants are not OB/GYN physicians. Their concerted efforts to intrude into the confidentiality of the consultation is the equivalent of having Ted Cruz, Jason Chaffetz, David Daleiden, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and their anti-abortion acolytes clamoring in the exam room.

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