(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
“You need to hear what she has to say,” declared Good Morning America co-host Diane Sawyer before a laudatory profile on Thursday of Jane Fonda and her crusade to counter conservatives as she advocates access for minors to contraceptives.
Fonda argued: “In this country, you think, 'Oh my gosh, if we tell kids how to avoid getting pregnant, it's going to make them have sex.' Come on! I mean, take your head out of the sand. Come on! It is so disrespectful to young people.”
ABC’s Nancy Snyderman endorsed the sentiment: “Telling words from a woman and icon who went from acting to activism, a woman who says she didn't begin to find her real self until well after she hit middle age…”
Sawyer set up the January 31 profile caught by the MRC’s Jessica Anderson: “And Jane Fonda joins us now, provocative as ever, talking about President Bush, talking about her celebrated and now-ended marriage to the high-voltage Ted Turner, and her passion for improving the lives of young girls around the world.” Sawyer insisted: “You need to hear what she has to say.”
Nancy Snyderman handled the pre-taped interview: “This is the Jane Fonda you thought you knew. This is the Jane Fonda you need to know, working with young women in Third World countries, giving them information about basic human rights, sexuality, self-worth.”
Snyderman to Fonda: “At this stage in your life, having done so much, you're now an activist really fighting for young women around the globe. Why?”
Fonda: “It's taken me far too long to gain my voice and I don't want that to be the case for other girls. When you give girls information about their bodies, access to health care, education and rights, they become whole, safer, they can stand up for themselves, they refuse genital mutilation, they refuse to be married as child brides, they tend to have smaller families and they tend to want their children to be educated and healthy like they are. If you deny girls those things, then you begin to see tremendous poverty, then sustainable development is impossible and you begin to see tremendous population growth.”
Snyderman: “So whose cages should we be rattling?”
Fonda: “We should be rattling the Bush cage and our elected senators and congressmen, and we should say to them, 'We care about girls' and women's rights and health, and we want you, as our representatives, to care too and to put it into practice with money.'”
Snyderman: “Fonda also fights for the young people in her own backyard, now in Georgia, arming them with information and choices.”
Fonda: “In this country, you think, 'Oh my gosh, if we tell kids how to avoid getting pregnant, it's going to make them have sex.' Come on! I mean, take your head out of the sand. Come on! It is so disrespectful to young people.”
Snyderman: “Telling words from a woman and icon who went from acting to activism, a woman who says she didn't begin to find her real self until well after she hit middle age, well after two Oscars, two marriages and children.
“In each decade of your life, have you continued to find more and more of this voice that's been, sort of, simmering inside of you?”
Fonda: “Mmhmm. I feel like some kind of an underground plant that has grown racines [Jessica looked that up and it’s the root of a Latin word] under the surface and then, but it wasn't until I was 60 that they started to come over, to come above ground.”
Snyderman: “At 60 you were married to Ted Turner. Was that part of this metamorphosis?”
Fonda: “Yeah, he was very much a part of my healing and growth, and so is the fact that I'm not with him now. But you know something so great about him? He understands what we're talking about. He gets it. This good old boy from the South that my son calls 'Bubba,' with his U.N. foundation, he understands that the future of the world depends on the empowerment of women and girls and the slowing of population growth, which are really one and the same.”
Snyderman concluded: “Change seems the only thing constant in Jane Fonda's life. Today at 64 and with a mission, she is a reluctant celebrity, but she knows it is her celebrity that will further her cause.”
Fonda: “If we can make our girls strong before they lose it as women the way I did and so many other women did, you're changing the future of the world.”
Sawyer oozed: “Again, Jane Fonda, who has polarized us in her history and been provocative all along and talking about change.”