ustxtxb_obs_1992_11_13_50_00017-00000_000.pdf

through certain fundamental churches and through the Catholic hierarchy, urging people to do certain things. And it’s like the Sunday not too long ago, when people lined a very long route \(along Lamar Boulevard through certain churches. They have their people together once a week, and they can leaflet the cars. We don’t have any place our people are together once a week, and so we have to reach them through mailing lists and phone calls, and those are both timeand money-intensive. And we don’t have an organized source of money in the same way that the opposition does. If we really had a pure system where everybody went to vote, and it’s not a tug of war between two sides and who can mount the greatest effort and money, then it \(a state referenattracted to. But the way it is, most people don’t vote. A lot of people aren’t sure of the issues when they do vote. In Washington state, the opposition kept saying if you pass this, it will increase your taxes by millions of dollars to pay for abortion. Well, the truth was Washington state was already paying for abortion for Medicaid women. But to have the money to answer that is really very difficult. So I guess what I fear is the distortions [of the truth], and the distortions in terms of organizational strength. Our people are live-and-letlive people. I’m not trying to tell anybody else what to do. I’m just trying to get them to leave people alone. It’s much. easier if you’re passionate about saying, “I’ve got the one true way and you should live exactly the’way I tell you.” And so our organizational problems are tougher. TO Being on the trail with the Clinton-Gore campaign, what feel do you get? Weddington: It is so positive it scares me. It’s like I’m afraid I’ll jinx it if I say out loud: So we’re whispering it to each other! But it really feels good. It feels good partially because there’s a real sense of momentum and energy, there’s a lot of interest in the debates that’s a big topic of conversationand then I think there’s just such disappointment with George Bush at both a personal and professional level. My own feeling is that he really made a bargain to sell women out in 1980. I can’t proye it, but my guess is, somebody said to him, you won’t get the nomination for President and you won’t get to be Vice President unless you’re opposed to abortion. And I don’t think it took him two minutes to say, “well, okay, that’s more important to me than any equity issues for women or the impact of this on them.” And so I think he stuck with that bargain he made, and I hope it buries him. TO: What moved you to write your book? Weddington: The book was a variety of motivations. One was out of desperation because as you could see the judges leaving, it looked worse and worse from the standpoint of what was the Supreme Court going to do. I was travized that if I traveled every day for the rest of my life, the number of people you can reach that way is so limited, that I was looking for a way to expand my ability to reach out…. The second thing is history. It will be the twentieth anniversary \(of this year, and I think it took some years for me to have a perspective about the issue. I wanted something that would put this piece of history into a permanent record. The third thing was that I thought that there were a lot of people who were involved with this from the beginning who had never really been recognized very much; their names had never been known. And while I couldn’t name everybody in the book I tried, and the editor marked out a lot of them because they became lists of names almost it was that sense that what will save Roe v. Wade is lots of people getting involved; that they don’t necessarily know how their own energies or efforts will have a long-term impact, but Roe v. Wade was, to me, won by lots of people doing what they could. And that was the message I was trying to get out now: that it’s going to take lots of people doing what they can. It will be a fight over who gets, first, appointed and then confirmed to the Supreme Court. There are going to be fights over federal legislation. There are going to be fights in every state over rules introduced. There’s the problem of how do you help women get access to services? There are so few places that actually do abortion now. How do you defend the clinics? There are so many issues that there’s lots of room for anybody to work. The book was to remind people that we didn’t wake up one morning and say, “Let’s win a Supreme Court case.” Nobody knew it would end up where it did when we started it. We just all did what we could. Now we really need everybody pitching in to do what they can. TO: The book must have been a tremendous amount of work. Weddington: It was. Of course it took me a long time to live it. I had voluminous files, even if I gave some away when I went to Washington. About two-and-a-half years ago I started researching the book. I went back and found my old calendars from that early time period. I had kept scrapbooks of articles and that kind of stuff, and I could go back and see what I was saying at different periods. I talked to the other women here in town and some who were away, did some traveling to interview people. No one person remembered everything, but I would go and interview people and take what they told me and send it to other people involved at the same time period, and that would trigger their memory for other things. A year ago I spent the whole summer here writing, and by the end of the summer I had a version that was 22 chapters, twice the size of the.current book, and sent it to an agent, and never even heard from her. Then I went back and rewrote it and shortened it a good bit and then found a publisher that was interested, and they said it needed to be more readerfriendly, so I edited some more. Probably I have a whole other book left from what was cut from this one. Part of what got cut were the chapters on the White House years [when she was an aide to Jimmy Carter] and the years in the Texas Legislature … I had always wanted to write a book called Some Leaders Are Born Women. People had told me that nine months to a year was minimum to publish a book, even after editing. I really wanted the book out before the election, because I didn’t want to just write about history; I wanted to help create it. So Putnam’s was the group that agreed to turn up all burners and get it out in the fall. It was out Sept. 16th. TO: You do not use the term”pro-life” in your book. You call anti-choice people the “antis.” Weddington: That’s right. I don’t think they are pro-life more than we are pro-life. We are all pro-life; it’s how we define it that’s so different. Planned Parenthood has done some charts that show that those legislators who most vote against abortion are often the ones also voting against various programs that would benefit pregnant women who want to continue pregnancy, and benefit children. I do think those who oppose abortion are simply anti-abortion or pro-mandatory birth. TO: Do you do some lobbying now? Weddington: I do. TO: I understand that you are a lobbyist for Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, and I hear grumblings in the anti-nuclear community in Austin about that. Weddington: First, I think there is no question that the issue is not are there going to be additional power plants. I would never be working for that. It is how do we responsibly dispose of the waste that is already generated. In this case there is federal law that says if a state compacts with another state, that would protect the first state from having waste from any place else put into its state. It was a scheme that Congress came up with because what they didn’t want was 50 sites for low-level nuclear wastenot nuclear rods, not things that are highly radioactive but rather things like boots and shoes and building materials which may have been exposed to some radiation. That’s why it’s called low-level. They didn’t want 50 sites because those are much harder to watch over, to be sure they’re done well, and a lot of states don’t really have any place that’s really good from a geological point of view to store anything. Maine is one of those; their water table is right under the surface…. Now there are some people who say the federal government won’t make the states do that I think they will, because I think it would be better to have a few sites that you could really manage, that the bigger states are more capable of managing it well, instead of having every state with a different site. I think Maine is a very environmentally conscious state, doesn’t have any place in its state that works as well as the places we have, and they have a low amount of waste material. I think they’re very conscientious in how they handle their own stream of THE TEXAS OBSERVER 17 -4,174****101,10 4.0″swrom.”61 44,.;”*.r. ,….*A4.04411000…10.F.,n ,