Word: wattleton
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When the red light of the television camera winks on, most people also light up, becoming warmer and more animated than their everyday selves. But when Faye Wattleton, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sits before the camera's eye -- something she is doing with ever greater frequency these days -- she turns chillier and more controlled than her already well-disciplined self. Her speech becomes stricter, her smile tighter. Wattleton monitors herself closer than the camera does, for she is intent on being nothing less than perfect, as though a single dangling modifier or wayward statistic will bring...
...Wattleton wears the burden, though she would call it the honor, of being a role model. As a black woman, divorced mother and crusader for family planning, she feels the pressure of being held up as a symbol, and she is determined neither to let up nor to let anyone down...
...worked for was in danger when the Supreme Court handed down its Webster decision this past July, permitting states to narrow a woman's access to abortion. Planned Parenthood, the nation's oldest and largest family-planning organization, is also the premier institution providing abortions around the country, and Wattleton is fiercely dedicated to protecting that service. She had visions of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and spoke darkly of a return to the era of back-alley abortions...
Webster turned out to be just such an opportunity. The decision had the unintended consequence of rousing the moribund pro-choice movement. Wattleton had long maintained that a silent majority of American women did not want anyone tampering with their reproductive freedom. "Now the majority is getting noisy," she says. Witness the recent national Mobilization for Women's Lives and the elections in New Jersey and Virginia in which voters selected pro-choice Governors. Wattleton asserts that she does not want her teenage daughter to be fighting the same battles she is. To that end, this woman who looks like...
...Wattleton, the only child of a woman who was a Fundamentalist minister in St. Louis, was appointed head of Planned Parenthood eleven years ago, at age 34. She was a plucky choice for an institution traditionally headed by button- down white men, an organization that had become as all-American as the Girl Scouts and debutante parties. Within her first three years, Wattleton, a former nurse and midwife whose primary bureaucratic experience had been running the Dayton affiliate, shifted the organization's structure to a crisply corporate one, reshuffling more than half of the national office's employees...