Campaign Visit Reinforces Commitment of NARAL Pro-Choice New Mexico to Elect a Pro-Choice President
Albuquerque, NM – As President Bush’s re-election campaign stopped in Albuquerque, NM today, NARAL Pro-Choice New Mexico emphasized its commitment to electing a pro-choice President this November, and highlighted its aggressive plan to reach targeted voters – particularly younger women and infrequent voters – in the state through a variety of tools, including direct mail, phone banking, ongoing volunteer trainings, house parties, email advocacy and grassroots activism.
Giovanna Rossi, Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice New Mexico, said, “Our fundamental freedoms are in jeopardy under George W. Bush. Our right to privacy could be eliminated if he is allowed to serve a second term and given the chance to name new justices to the Supreme Court – his White House has already talked to Clarence Thomas about elevating him to Chief Justice. Bush has pursued a relentlessly anti-choice agenda, and won’t even support equal access to birth control, or even responsible sex education.”
At the beginning of his career in politics, President Bush stated that he would do “everything in [his] power to restrict abortions.” And this is one pledge that he has fulfilled.
From the beginning of his presidency, Bush has kept up a relentless series of anti-choice actions. Highlights include:
• Aggressively packing the courts with anti-choice activists, including one who wrote that women’s role is to be subservient to men, another who called Roe v Wade “abominable,” and a third who Bush’s own White House Counsel accused of “unconscionable judicial activism.”
• Allowing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice to subpoena women’s private medical records simply because they had abortions and to argue that there is no such thing as physician-patient privilege.
• Cutting off family planning services to some of the world’s poorest women – on his first full day in office. Bush denied funds to overseas health clinics that provide or even discuss abortion – funds they need to provide basic health care to women and children.
• Pressuring the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into rejecting a proposal to make abortion less necessary by allowing over-the-counter sales of the “morning after pill” -- ignoring its own experts’ advice to allow the sale of the Plan B emergency contraceptive.
• Steering funds away from responsible sex education in favor of “abstinence-only” programs which censor medically accurate information and forbid discussion of birth control beyond failure rates.
Rossi continued, “As the leading protector of choice in the state of New Mexico, NARAL Pro-Choice New Mexico will be doing everything in its power from now through November 2 to ensure the election of a President who will protect a woman’s right to make the most intensely personal decisions about her reproductive health – with her family and her doctor – and without government interference.
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Contact: Giovanna Rossi at (505) 620-6030
