Preparatory English: Vestibular

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Views on Abortion Strain Calls for Unity at Womens March on Washington
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

1 As a self-described feminist and law student who wants to correct racial wrongs in the criminal justice
2 system, Maria Lyon agrees with Hillary Clinton that womens rights are human rights. But when
3 thousands of women march on the capital the day after Donald J. Trump is inaugurated as president,
4 she will not be there. The reason: She opposes abortion. Its hard, because right now it feels like if
5 youre pro-life, youre anti-woman, said Ms. Lyon, 23, who studies law at the University of Wisconsin.
6 Thats kind of the traditional rhetoric. Its like if you care about women and you care about womens
7 rights then you should be pro-choice.
8 Ms. Lyon is not the only feminist agonizing. Across the country, women who oppose abortion
9 including one in six women who supported Hillary Clinton, according to a recent survey by the Pew
10 Research Center are demanding to be officially included in Saturdays Womens March on
11 Washington. But those requests have been spurned, creating a bitter rift among womens
12 organizations, and raising thorny questions about what it means to be a feminist in 2017.
13 If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a womans
14 right to choose, Linda Sarsour, a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American Muslim racial justice and civil-
15 rights activist, and one of four co-chairwomen of the march, said in an interview on Tuesday.
16 Now these tensions, which have simmered behind the scenes, are spilling out into the open. On
17 Monday, march organizers revoked so-called partnership status a kind of official recognition
18 for a Texas anti-abortion group, New Wave Feminists. (Ms. Sarsour called the initial decision to
19 include the group a mistake.)
20 Many anti-abortion women like Ms. Lyon are simply staying home. But one group, Students for Life
21 of America, which organizes college students to oppose abortion, does plan to march, banners and
22 all. Kristan Hawkins, its president, a 31-year-old mother of four, said she, too, made a request for
23 partnership status, which she said was ignored. She said her marchers will wear Go-Pro cameras:
24 When they start spitting and screaming at us it will be helpful.
25 The march comes as abortion foes are newly emboldened by the election of Mr. Trump. He won
26 the support of 53 percent of white women, who flocked to him primarily for economic reasons,
27 pollsters said, but also because he made explicit promises to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973
28 Supreme Court decision that found a right to abortion within the privacy protections of the
29 Constitution. Abortion opponents will mark the 44th anniversary of the landmark ruling with their
30 own event, the March for Life, next week. Kellyanne Conway, who will be Mr. Trumps White House
31 counselor after becoming the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign, will speak
32 at that march.
33 At the same time, Republicans on Capitol Hill are threatening to withdraw taxpayer funding for
34 Planned Parenthood, the reproductive rights behemoth. The group is the lead financial sponsor of
35 the Womens March and is helping to organize the event, along with Naral Pro-Choice America and
36 other abortion-rights organizations. Their participation makes it clear: Abortion opponents are out of
37 step with the march. Reproductive freedom or reproductive justice means that women decide the
38 fate of our own bodies, Gloria Steinem, an honorary co-chairwoman of the march, wrote in an email
39 message. She said if women want to make decisions over their own bodies themselves, and want
40 other women to have the same power, then they should feel very welcome at the march.
41 Yet many women do not. Among them is Charmaine Yoest, a vocal opponent of abortion who is a
42 senior fellow at American Values, a conservative organization here.
43 This is what we conservative women live with all the time, this idea that we somehow arent really
44 women and we just reflect internalized misogyny, she said. Of the march, she added: I dont think
45 they represent women. I think they are a wholly owned subsidiary of the abortion movement.
46 The relationship, and sometimes tension, between reproductive rights and feminism goes back
47 decades, to the inception of so-called second wave feminism in the 1960s; the first wave culminated
48 in women winning the right to vote. Its pioneers, echoing the American lefts fight for racial justice
49 and its opposition to the Vietnam War, embraced the birth control pill as a way to give women more
50 power over their own lives. Thus a sexual revolution was born.
51 In 1973, just as middle-class women were abandoning homemaking for the work force, inspired by
52 writers like Ms. Steinem and Betty Friedan, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. That
53 drove a wedge in the womens movement, said Carole Joffe, a sociologist and reproductive rights
54 advocate at the University of California, San Francisco.
55 While many feminists saw the right to abortion as essential to womens empowerment, she said, the
56 decision also galvanized what we now call the religious right Catholics, Protestants and
57 evangelical Christians, as well as churchgoing African-Americans, a number of whom considered
58 themselves liberal on other issues.
59 I think this march will be discussed for a very long time, because this march raises in a very powerful
60 way the question of who can rightfully be called a feminist, what does feminist organizing mean in
61 the 21st century, Ms. Joffe said. Is it even possible to have a conception of American feminism that
62 does not involve pro-choice and pro-contraception?
63 Public sentiment on abortion has remained remarkably consistent over time. According to a Pew
64 survey conducted after the election, 7 in 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. Democrats
65 have historically been more in favor of abortion rights than Republicans, but despite a perception
66 that women are more supportive than men, there is often little daylight between the sexes on the
67 issue. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said that is because the question is inextricably tied to
68 faith, and women tend to be more religious than men.
69 With so many causes being represented from family leave legislation to gay rights to better police
70 treatment of minorities to access to abortion some disagreements were inevitable. Some
71 Facebook pages for the various marches around the country have broken out in contentious conflicts
72 over ethnicity and race, including whether it was necessary for white women to take a back seat in
73 leading the march.
74 Officials of Planned Parenthood and Naral, however, say that as soon as word of the march started
75 spreading, their members across the country began asking what they could do. Both groups have a
76 powerful presence here in the capital and are expert at organizing protests.
77 There have been some stories about anti-choice folks trying to show up in protest; Im not worried
78 about them theyre going to be drowned out by hundreds of thousands of folks, Mitchell Stille,
79 Narals national political director, said in an interview. Asked if those women could march in solidarity
80 with the march, Mr. Stille sounded irked.
81 Anti-choice women voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, he said. They got exactly what they
82 wanted, so Im not sure exactly what the solidarity of that would be.
83 Ms. Lyon, the law student, did not vote for Mr. Trump; she said she could not support either him or
84 Mrs. Clinton, and picked a third-party candidate.
85 Living in the liberal-leaning city of Madison, she often feels isolated for her views, which she said
86 she came to through research that reinforced her Catholic beliefs. She also accepts the churchs
87 ban on contraception, and sees her position as consistent with her pursuit of racial justice in prisons.
88 Asked to define feminism, she paused for a moment and said, I would define it as the right to live
89 out my womanhood.
01. Consider the following statements.
I According to Maria, those who are against abortion are anti-feminists.
II There has always been tension between the diferente groups inside the femist movement.
III The text defines feminism and those who are allowed to practice it.

Which are correct according to the text?

(A) Only I.
(B) Only II.
(C) Only I e II.
(D) Only I e III.
(E) I, II, III.

02. Consider if the statements below are true (T) or false (F), according to the text.

( ) Abortion oppositors felt encouraged to vote for Donald Trump.

( ) Roe v. Wade is a Supreme Court decision that guarantees womens rights to abortion.
( ) The right to abortion is an essential feminist agenda.
( ) Women are as religious as men when it comes to support abortion.

(A) F T F T
(B) F T T F
(C) T T T F
(D) T F T F
(E) F F T T

03. Select the alternative which presents the word and its respective synonym.
(A) thorny (l.12) prickly
(B) spitting (l.24) regurgitating
(C) flocked (l.26) - congregated
(D) withdraw (l.33) - remove
(E) wholly (l.45) partly

04. Match the words on the left with their appropriate synonyms on the right, according to the text.
( ) spurned (l.11) 1 - soothed
( ) simmered (l. 16) 2 - rejected
( ) revoked (l.17) 3 enacted
4 brewed
5 embraced
6 invalidated
(A) 2 3 6
(B) 1 6 5
(C) 2 4 6
(D) 6 5 3
(E) 1 4 2
05. The words demanding (l. 10), emboldened (l.25) and sentiment (l.63) can be substituted, without
change in meaning, by

(A) exhausting reassured feeling

(B) insisting inspired emotion
(C) challenging encouraged - attitude
(D) insisting reassured attitude
(E) exhausting - encouraged emotion

06. Consider the following statements.

I In the segment Planned Parenthood, the reproductive rights behemoth (l. 34), behemoth is
used to mean a power organization.
II The expression there is often little daylight between the sexes (l.64) denotes that commonly
there is no difference between men and womens stand on the issue of abortion.
III - In the segment Yet many women do not (l.41), Sheryl asserts that women are not welcomed to
the march.

Which are correct according to the text?

(A) Only I.
(B) Only II.
(C) Only I e II.
(D) Only I e III.
(E) I, II, III.

07. Select the alternative which presents the word and its respective translation, according to the text.
(A) rift (l.11) - problema
(B) spilling out (l.16) - derramando
(C) foes (l.25) - apoiadores
(D) landmark (.29) - monumento
(E) ruling (l.29) deciso

08. Consider the following positions of rewriting the segment whether it was necessary for white
women to take a back seat in leading the march (l.72-73)

I - whether it was necessary for white women to take a seat back in leading the march
II - if it was necessary for white women to take a back seat in leading the march
III - whether it was needed of white women to take a back seat in leading the march

(A) Only I.
(B) Only II.
(C) Only I e II.
(D) Only I e III.
(E) I, II, III.
 Communicative Practice

Can women ever achieve equality? What must be done in order to make this a realistic and
achievable goal?
What are some things that should have already been a reality for women in Brazil, but still
aren't?
The text mentions some rifts inside the feminist movement. What could be the outcome of such
rifts if they keep on existing?
The author of the article, Sheryl Stolberg, must be a feminist. What evidence given by the text
could have caused this assertion? Do you believe it to be true? Why/Why not?
Who is Maria Lyon and why is she mentioned in the article? What would you do if you were in
her shoes?
Is it possible to "point out" some of the arguments pro and against abortion from the article? Are
they evident? What are other arguments that you know of?
Which position is closest to your view on the matter?

Complete the following statements with the appropriate preposition. Then, use them to express yourself
on the issue at hand.

I sometimes worry _ _ _ ...

I don't think women will ever agree _ _ _ ...
Men usually get _ _ _ _ _ _ more things than women do. (provide examples)
Sexism comes _ _ _ ...
Some of the difficulties women go _ _ _ are...