When Sen. Joan Bray spoke to the Bonhomme Township Democrats, the subject of the coerced abortion bill came up, and Rep. Jill Schupp, sitting at the head table, described a hearing she had attended in the House:

Schupp:We had someone who testified she had an abortion when she was sixteen, who was …. She had a boyfriend, but she had, she became pregnant by someone else. She later in life married the boyfriend. He’s her husband. He sat by her while she testified. She said that her mom had convinced her that she should have an abortion, and she said that if she could, she would have her mom put in jail for forcing her at the age of sixteen to have an abortion from a boy who was not her boyfriend. Anyway, these are the kinds of things that are going on. I mean, for someone to say–and I specifically said to her, that you would have liked to have seen your mother go to jail? And she said, “Absolutely.”

These are the kinds of hearings that we’re having. And had the Senate, had Joan not worked so hard and, to, to, to take some of the edge off of that horrible bill, it would have passed in the House. Instead, the House didn’t even bring it back up.

Bray: Yeah it was made so unacceptable because it wasn’t horrible enough. I will tell you, I’ve had it up to here with these folks [inaudible]. And I am, you know, [applause] I’ve been there seventeen years that we’ve had these issues, seventeen years, it’s always been  what … how to put barriers up, how to put barriers, how to put barriers up. Never ONCE has it ever been acknowledged that a man has anything to do with an unwanted pregnancy. It’s: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” And so it’s just a re-e-al irrational … [someone adds: “ridiculous”] [Garbled] There is no acknowledgement that there’s any, any problem outside of a woman’s problem.

Audience member: Joan.

Bray: And it’s not just a woman’s problem. It’s our society’s problem.

Audience member: Joan, has anybody proposed an amendment to the bill that says you have to have informed consent to carry through with the pregnancy? That a doctor has to ….

Bray: We talked, we talked about that. You know, we talked about that. I brought that up. Yeah [nodding vigorously].

Audience member: And how about coercing your teenage daughter against an abortion? And make her donate her body [garbled]

I can imagine an anti-abortionist watching Senator Bray’s facial expression when she mocks the anti-abortionists’ attitude: “these women go out and get pregnant and then what are we going to do about it?” Such a person might think it fair to dismiss her altogether because she stooped to such a mean spirited caricature. But Bray is dead on in her characterization. Granted, few anti-abortionists would allow such facial contortions to show when they speak in the legislature or in most public forums, but make no mistake, Bray caught the souls of those judgmental folk. Consider that bills to prevent unplanned pregnancies languished in the last session of the Republican controlled House.  Consider that the representatives tried to pass House Bills 226 and 533, which would have allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Consider that in past sessions, Republicans have worked to deny poor women access to free contraception (how dare they enjoy sex without having to pay a penalty!).

Anti-abortionists oppose more than abortion. They want women to bear children–without discovering that sex in and of itself is kinda fun. And Joan Bray is rightly fed up to here with seventeen years of watching their nonsense.

Furthermore, some of them, when they don’t get their way, “water the radius around them with their vitriol” and [poke] dangerous lone wolfs with sticks” so that a young woman winds up wanting her mother put in jail and Dr. Tiller winds up dead.

Let me understate the case: theirs is not a healthy outlook.

Charlie Dooley pulled it out of her, Jill says: why she’s running, that is, for Sam Page’s House seat in Creve Coeur for the Dems. He kidded her, asked her if she was just some bored housewife who woke up one morning and said to herself: I think I’ll be a state rep. She gave Dooley’s question some thought and remembered that when she was seven or so, she was aware that a lot of people were hungry. She used to tell herself that when she grew up, she would take a suitcase (just like the one her parents had), fill it with steaks, and take it to poor people so that they would never be hungry again.

Her idea of how to help people has gotten … more nuanced now that she’s an adult. A lot more nuanced. We talked at length about what she’s learning these days: about eminent domain, proposed health care programs for Missouri’s poor, the long-term advantages of quality pre-schools and the need to offer free pre-school–to our poorest children, at least for starters. Then there are the tax issues: Every time she’s around Jeanette Mott-Oxford, she tells me, she wants to whip out a pen, because, when it comes to understanding tax justice issues in Missouri, Jeanette is “brilliant.”

So Jill Schupp isn’t just running a campaign. She’s simultaneously taking a crash course from the local reps in what every legislator ought to know. She’s serious about doing the job right if she wins.  

Education is an area she’s given lots of thought to–understandably, since she’s a former two-term Ladue School Board member. She’s already familiar with what the schools in her well-to-do district need, but she’s also thinking about the St. Louis City schools. Knowing that poor families who can’t meet the rent move often and that there’s sixty percent turnover in elementary schools every year in the city, she’d like to propose that children be kept in the same schools even when they do move. Without that kind of stability, getting a decent education is next to impossible. And unless we educate those young people, the entire metro community will continue to bear the burden of their failures.

Schupp thinks back to all the money this area spent during the school deseg years busing kids to county schools. And for what? An hour and half on the bus both ways left the kids too worn out to apply themselves. It would make more sense to put those transportation funds into keeping kids, for as long as possible, in their core schools.

Big ideas, no? Here’s another unusual idea: Schupp wants to build bridges with Republicans as much as possible. She’s good at it. As a city council member in Creve Coeur, she’s worked so well with the Republican mayor, Harold Dielmann, that he showed up at her campaign kickoff. He’ll always be a Republican, she says, but that doesn’t mean they can’t find common ground.

A further example of her bridge building talent comes from her school board days when she was a representative on the Missouri School Boards Association. The MSBA has members from every district, but it’s effectively run by the permanent staff. When Jill was a member, the MSBA had begun endorsing political candidates. The candidates were from both parties, but still, she didn’t feel those decisions represented the total membership. So she formed an alliance of members from various districts who lobbied school board representatives throughout the state and, using their combined voices, they got that practice eliminated. It was the first time the temporary members had ever gotten a policy changed at MSBA.

Jill strikes me as a sane person with a “we’re all in this together” outlook on life. And she’s principled. After the “interview”, we chit-chatted about national politics, and McCain’s name came up. I mentioned that the Dems ought to hit him hard about wanting to stay in Iraq for a hundred years, and Jill said that, as she recalled, that remark of his had been taken out of context. The discussion had been about leaving some troops there once the bulk of them were gone, and that’s when McCain made the “one hundred years” remark.

Still, I said, it’s kind of tempting to hit him over the head with it. His policies are ugly in so many ways, and we must beat him. Of course his policies are ugly, Jill said. But let’s not stretch the truth. Let’s nail him for the stuff he’s really guilty of.

She’s right. That “steaks in the suitcase” seven year old has grown up with her determination to help people intact and with a fine-tuned conscience.

Jill Schupp is the Dem hoping to hold onto Same Page’s House of Representatives seat in St. Louis County for our side this  year. Her campaign kickoff Thursday night was well attended, and the number of officeholders in attendance struck me as a clue about how serious Dems are about hanging onto that seat.

There were a couple of school board members, a mayor, County Council members Mike O’Mara and Barbara Fraser, and four Democratic candidates for office (Andria Simckes, running for State Treasurer, Deb Lavender, running for state rep in Kirkwood, Stacey Newman, running for Margaret Donnelly’s house seat, and Byron DeLear, running for Akin’s congressional seat).

A hefty contingent of Jeff City types also showed up:

Joan Bray, state senator

And the following representatives:

Sam Page (Of course, he would attend.)

Jeff Roorda

Robin Wright Jones

Jake Zimmerman

Clint Zweifel

My apologies to anyone I may have missed.