There was a whole lot of horn honking by the New Haven Green at rush hour Monday as demonstrators in hot pink t‑shirts sent a message about the Supreme Court nomination hearings getting underway in Washington.
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It doesn’t take a lot of people to provide visibility, especially when they’re wearing hot pink t‑shirts and holding signs that say, “Honk 4 Choice.” Demonstrators brought that visibility to the Green Monday to coincide with the beginning of hearings into John Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Planned Parenthood of Connecticut brought a dozen women to the
intersection of College and Elm streets to promote their view that
nominees to the Supreme Court should support privacy rights, and thus
abortion rights.
Vice President Susan Yolen says Planned Parenthood hasn’t come
out publicly yet to oppose Roberts’ nomination. “I think our big concern is that we don’t know he’d be so bad,” Yolen says, “but it feels like the White House is bound and determined to prevent us from knowing anything more by keeping important documents from the public view.”
There was a lot of horn honking on the Green coming from cars, the electric trolley, and some big 16-wheelers. One woman said the only negative response to Planned Parenthood’s streetcorner advocacy was the middle finger of a young man in the back seat of a car.
One pro-choice Yale undergraduate said she feels it’s no big deal if Roberts replaces the late Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, because Rehnquist was also anti-choice. But she agreed that President Bush’s opportunity to appoint a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor was fraught with danger, since, as a swing voter, O’Connor’s vote most often swung in favor of reproductive rights.
Debbie Conlon walked by the “visible” women and said, “I think it’s
fantastic that Planned Parenthood is finally taking a more visible
stance on the attacks on Roe vs. Wade. I pass Planned Parenthood
every Saturday morning, and there are all these men out there, holding signs of aborted fetuses and telling lies, such as that abortion causes breast cancer. That is so obnoxious — it’s so untrue. And to a certain extent, I think that it’s on every woman to step forward and make sure that Roe v. Wade doesn’t disappear, especially the younger generation.”
Conlon said Planned Parenthood made a huge difference in her life. “I
became sexually active at 17, and it was a place I could go that
provided me with more information than my parents did, and it was useful to have that information. I didn’t want children and I wanted to be able to control that situation. They were very open, very informative, and very affordable for a 17-year-old.”
