E-Mail This Article to a Friend A choice career When Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, the pro-choice movement hoped it had fought its last hard fight. But Melissa Kogut, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, says it ain’t so. BY TAMARA WIEDER

MELISSA KOGUT hopes she knows where you’ll be on April 25. In fact, she hopes she knows where more than a million people will be on April 25 — and she’s been working tirelessly to be sure she’s right. That’s the day hundreds of thousands of people are expected to converge on Washington, DC, for the March for Women’s Lives, a public demonstration in support of reproductive freedom for all women. As executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, the state affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Kogut is keenly aware of the growing threat to women’s right to choose — a threat greater now than at any time since 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion.

Q: What’s your background? How’d you end up at NARAL?

A: I started working at NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts in my 20s, as a volunteer. I actually attended the Chocolate Madness [NARAL benefit] event with a friend, and I learned that a woman’s right to choose was threatened. In fact, at that time, we were about to face a ballot initiative that would have outlawed public funding of abortion for poor women. This was 1986. It would’ve also paved the way to outlaw abortion if Roe were ever overturned. So we defeated that, and I began to get involved with the organization, and joined the staff as an organizer in the late ’80s, and have kind of risen through the ranks, and have been the director for about eight or nine years now.

Q: What’s kept you there so long?

A: The issue continues to be just unbelievably compelling to me. It’s not gone away; in fact, the threats are greater today than when I first started working on the issue. And the landscape is constantly changing, so it’s actually challenging, it’s fun, there’s great people that I work with.

Q: How does NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts fit into the national NARAL scheme?

A: We are the state affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Our focus is on protecting the right to choose for women in Massachusetts. National NARAL has a national focus; they focus on congressional races, presidential elections, statewide trends. They provide support to affiliates so we can be growing in states all over the country. But our focus is really here at home.

Q: Are there particular areas within Massachusetts that you find yourself more focused on than others?

A: Well, the core of our mission is political, so we focus on elections and legislation. The House of Representatives is where we focus because we’re short about five votes in order to be able to have a pro-choice majority. And the Speaker’s anti-choice, so that’s kind of the focus of our work. But in recent years, we’ve also been focusing on access to services, and looking at what community health centers are doing to provide emergency contraception and what hospitals are doing to provide abortion services and emergency contraception, because while it’s absolutely vital that the political side of things is working, if abortion is legal and it’s not accessible, then that’s a problem too.

Q: What are the organization’s main initiatives right now?

A: Emergency contraception, which has become a major project for us. It has tremendous untapped potential for reducing unintended pregnancy, and we’re working on it from multiple angles. We have a bill that we filed and we’re working on that; we’re also working in local communities to see if we can improve public awareness of emergency contraception. And we’ve also developed a statewide emergency-contraception network.

In addition to that, we are working on elections. And the overarching thing right now is the March for Women’s Lives; that’s what we’re working on morning, noon, and night.

Q: Tell me about the march.

A: Choice has never been more threatened than it is today. Both the president and the Congress are aligned in their commitment to restrict access to abortion. We really see this as a wake-up call. Our national organization came together with several national organizations to call the march. We’re organizing here in Massachusetts to bring the largest delegation we’ve ever brought before to a march. We have our own coalition here that we’re working in. It’s a diverse coalition from the perspective of age; I mean, we have women who are going who are grandmothers and daughters and granddaughters. I think we’re going to see people from all walks of life coming from Massachusetts to go to the march.

Q: Do you have a goal in mind in terms of numbers you’d like to see from Massachusetts?

A: We don’t have a number goal. We want thousands of people to come from among our own membership ranks, but we also want to reach a broader public, and we’re not going to know — you know, we’re doing media and other outreach, and there’ll be no way for us to count. We know that we have, right now, 35 buses that are going from Massachusetts, and that’s growing. So we’ll be able to count the people who go on buses. But it’s going to be very hard [counting] people who are just getting in their cars and driving, and buying their own plane tickets. We’re trying to get people to register. So we don’t really have an established goal; the goal that we have is what kinds of activities are we going to do to get the word out so that people know how to get there.