Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Faye Wattleton

In 1990, Wattleton, along with (among others) Shirley Chisolm, Byllye Avery, Donna Brazile, Dorothy Height, Maxine Waters, and Julianne Malveaux, formed the group African American Women for Reproductive Freedom to show their support for Roe v. Wade and doing so with what we now call a reproductive-justice framework, as seen in this statement:

We understand why African-American women risked their lives then and why they seek safe, legal abortion now. It’s been a matter of survival. Hunger and homelessness. Inadequate housing and income to properly provide for themselves and their children. Family instability. Rape. Incest. Abuse. Too young, too old, too sick, too tired. Emotional, physical, mental, economic, social–the reasons for not carrying a pregnancy to term are endless and varied, personal, urgent and private. And for all these pressing reasons, African-American women once again will be among the first forced to risk their lives if abortion is made illegal.

There have always been those who have stood in the way of our exercising our rights, who tried to restrict our choices. There probably always will be. But we who have been oppressed should not be swayed in our opposition to tyranny of any kind, especially attempts to take away our reproductive freedom. You may believe abortion is wrong. We respect your belief and we will do all in our power to protect that choice for you. You may decide that abortion is not an option you would choose. Reproductive freedom guarantees your right not to. All that we ask is that no one deny another human being the right to make her own choice. That no one condemn her to exercising her choices in ways that endanger her health, her life. And that no one prevent others from creating safe, affordable, legal conditions to accommodate women, whatever the choices they make. Reproductive freedom gives each of us the right to make our own choices and guarantees us a safe, legal, affordable support system. It’s the right to choose.

It is also during the early part of her tenure at PPFA, Wattleton says in her autobiography, NOW, that the religious right and the anti-choice  groups were forming a formidable coalition to dismantle Roe v. Wade. She said that the organizations dimissed her prediction because they viewed these groups as populated with ignorant people who couldn’t possibly have the skills to do such a thing. Suffice to say, we’re now seeing the results of those feminist/reproductive freedom groups ignoring Wattleton’s political prescience in too many behind-the-eight-ball defensive positions articulated in public conversations about the issue.

When Wattleton decided to step down from PPFA, she confided in her daughter Felicia:

When Faye Wattleton, exhausted after 14 contentious years as president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, faced the painful prospect of quitting the job she loved, whom did she confide in first? Not her colleagues, not her friends, and not her mother, Ozie, a fire-and-brimstone Church of God minister who had always disapproved of her daughter’s fervent pro-choice crusade. (Later, told of the resignation, Ozie commented only: “My prayers have been answered.”) No, Ozie would not be a comfort now, even though she had been, in her devotion to what she believed, an imposing example. Instead the confidante Wattleton went to was the person she calls a powerful mentor: a woman named Felicia Gordon, who happens to be her daughter and was 16 years old at the time.

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