Silent No More

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr.

Dear Mr. President,

I am elderly, and this letter is to enlighten you about what women have suffered in their long battle for reproductive freedom . . . When I was a student at the University of Arkansas, I was an acquaintance of a very popular and attractive student there. She became pregnant. Because the attitude of the scarlet letter was still prevalent, without telling her parents, she had an illegal abortion. She died a terrible death from septicemia. Friends told me how she literally chewed up her tongue and screamed in agony . . . You want to take girls back to those days of death and horror.

This passionate epistle to President Reagan is one of some 20,000 letters and testimonies collected by a coalition of pro-choice organizations to launch a yearlong campaign titled "Abortion Rights: Silent No More." The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) led groups like Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, and Catholics for a Free Choice in the campaign, which is designed to counter what they see as the growing tendency of antiabortion advocates to dominate the public debate.

The campaign kicked off last month with a series of nationwide "speak-outs" in forums ranging from a Unitarian church in Georgia to the Massachusetts statehouse in Boston. Women and men alike read accounts of the tragic operations that took place before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. An even greater number, however, read stories about women who had received necessary, beneficial, legal abortions without danger or guilt. A huge speak-out is scheduled for this Tuesday in Washington. From 7 a.m. until midnight, letters and statements will be read in the western plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue. The following day, pro-choice advocates plan to leave copies of some of the accounts with Senators and Congressmen.

The speak-outs are an attempt to emphasize the personal rather than the political side of the pro-choice movement. Criticizing antiabortion activists, Nanette Falkenberg, executive director of NARAL, says, "No one is talking to women and men who have made a decision on this. They are interviewing doctors, theologians, bio-ethicists. But the real experts are the men and women who decide. That perspective makes the issue real." According to NARAL, 1.5 million women a year choose to have an abortion. Advertisements for the movement show three women of different ages and races, one of them holding a baby. "We are your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, your friends," the ad copy reads, "and abortion is a choice we have made."

The Silent No More crusade is coming on the heels of a well-publicized pro- life campaign last winter. In January, 70,000 antiabortion demonstrators took part in a March for Life in Washington, as they have done on each anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and were addressed by Reagan. His message: "These days, as never before, the momentum is with us." A graphic film that shows ultrasound images of a fetus being aborted, The Silent Scream, has received wide play and inflamed antiabortion passions, even though a number of medical authorities have denounced it as a distortion. "We are responding to what the pro-lifers have done," says Lauren Virshup, executive director of the California branch of NARAL, "but what we do will have a life of its own." Argues Virshup of what she hopes will be a reinvigorated pro-choice movement: "When people really understand that we may be on the brink of losing legal abortion, the energy we once had will return."

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles and Jane O''Reilly/Key West