Let me guess. Drug bans have been an extraordinary success. Banning guns will make them magically disappear. If you want to ban abortions you must exist in a sterile environment where you are sheltered from the real world.
My opinions on abortions are simple. I would never want to outlaw abortions. I’ve seen black market and third world medical conditions. I’d rather see less women in a place where they feel like their only option is to abort. In that sense I’d like to see less abortions happen.
When I went to Uganda to provide medical care with a group of volunteer medics and doctors I saw all I can handle of black market & third world medical conditions. I’m pro life because I want to see less abortions. I’m pro-choice because subjecting women at home to what I saw in Uganda would to be an injustice I can’t handle.
How can you be “pro-life” and be willing to put women in such a risk? What sort of pro-life position is it to create a black market for abortions? Abortions wont happen in back alleys if you get your ban. They will happen in conditions that will make a back alley look like a surgical suit in an hospital emergency room. What sort of “pro-life” individual wants to subject another human being to horrific medical conditions?
Am I making any sense? Do people understand that replacing your version of injustice with another isn’t a solution to anything?
I invite anyone who wants to ban abortions to join me for a tour of the real world. When you first leave your sterile existence you will be terrified. The residents of reality will lead you safely into the real world. Come join the rest of humanity in a loving, dangerous, horrific and terribly wonderful existence. In the real world your mind will be opened to an amazing reality that might just blow your mind.
However until you join the rest of us here in reality you have no right to reach beyond your sterile bubble and try to effect our world. Real people live here. Real people who bleed real blood and die real deaths. This ain’t no fantasy. It’s much better if you’re worthy of it.
Keep it up wswni. Only the dead stop learning. The living can be reached with a message worth sharing. You girls are doing a great job! I’ve gotta go get an old 1930s ford tractor running. The real world is awesome! You girls are in it with me and millions of others. I don’t doubt that for a second!
This is not a famous picture, but it should be. Forty years ago, the March 22, 1973 issue of Jet magazine featured Dr. T.R.M. Howard and a staffer attending a prostrate female patient on its cover, all under a yellow headline: “Legal Abortion: Is it Genocide or Blessing in Disguise?” This remarkable image reportedly depicts preparations for one of the first legal abortions in Illinois (though it could also have been staged).
Just two months after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and a week after Illinois OKed the procedure on its soil, Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason (or T.R.M.) Howard began performing legal abortions at his Friendship Medical Center in Chicago. According to the accompanying feature story, Black and white women alike jammed the clinic’s waiting room and phone lines. Outside, Jesse Jackson—once a protégée of Howard’s—picketed and called abortion Black genocide.
Yes, Abortion Is a Women’s Issue, and Yes, More Male Allies Are Welcome
Further, sexist assumptions about women’s role in reproduction are at the core of other oppressions women face. Rape culture is intertwined with ideas that men are irresistibly driven to sex, that women are submissive sexual objects to be conquered, that women are either sluts or prudes. Lack of family supports in the workplace, from paid sick days to paid family leave, are tied with exclusionary and outdated middle-class white assumptions that there will be a woman in the home to take care of the family, and discrimination in pay, promotion, and leadership is underpinned by assumptions that men are primary breadwinners. Pretending that social discrimination against women is not linked with sexual discrimination against women, which can therefore be ignored, may feel “less controversial” but it’s not going to get us anywhere.
When men are quoted in the media five times more often than women on the topics of abortion and birth control, we are simply not ready to move abortion into a post-gender framework that declares abortion is “not a women’s issue.” In particular, it seems that society has a great deal of resistance to putting younger women and women of color, not mutually exclusive categories, at the center of reproductive rights conversations.
While we need more men, more LGBTQ people, and more of everyone taking leadership in the reproductive rights movement, those most directly affected by abortion restrictions—younger women and women of color—need more focus, not less. Turn on the television, and it’s not uncommon to see a white man opposing abortion rights and, if a pro-choice woman is included at all, she is often white and past reproductive age.
Within the abortion rights movement, there is some resistance to having the most directly affected lead the message in a way that doesn’t seem to be paralleled in other human rights movements, including LGBTQ movements and civil rights movements. Some take offense when it is suggested that more younger women and women of color should help lead. This is something that I hope men will keep in mind when taking on leadership roles in the movement. It is possible to be a loud ally and also be an ally who works to ensure more young women and women of color are included, and your sisters need the help.
Do we need more men to fight for reproductive and sexual rights on their own terms? Do we welcome more men to fight for abortion as human rights issues, public health issues, and women’s issues? Is it cool if those men want to call themselves “bro-choice”? The answer is an enthusiastic yes.
Will Live Action Threaten the Provider-Patient Relationship in Abortion Care?
In the period immediately after Roe v. Wade, it was very common in most abortion settings for designated counselors or physicians to have the opportunity for open-ended discussion with a patient. This kind of encounter, which goes beyond offering the patient the requisite informed consent information and ascertaining she has not been coerced into the decision, has been difficult for many facilities to sustain over the years for various reasons, not the least being that in many states patient-doctor time is eaten up by doctors having to impart to patients legislatively mandated scripts about abortion, many of which contain blatant falsehoods. Nevertheless, most abortion facilities with which I am familiar make every effort to offer additional conversational time to patients who seem most in need of it.
What do these efforts to maintain meaningful provider-patient conversations have to do with Live Action, the anti-abortion group notorious for its undercover “investigations” of abortion clinics? For several years, Live Action operatives, pretending to be prospective abortion patients, have gone into clinics, questioning various levels of staff about abortion policies and procedures, and when their hidden cameras manage to catch a staff person making an inopportune comment, the organization triumphantly posts videos (typically highly edited) of these visits.
The latest Live Action “gotcha” moment is in a video of Dr. Leroy Carhart, one of the few providers in the United States who openly provides post-24-week abortions in selected circumstances, and as such is a longstanding target of the anti-abortion movement. In the video, Carhart is repeatedly grilled by a would-be patient, who portrays herself as 26 weeks pregnant, as to the procedure he would use in a pregnancy of that gestation. In response to the woman’s stated concern that a fetus whose demise has been caused by injection “would decay inside of her,” Carhart seeks to reassure her, at one point saying the fetus would soften like “meat in a Crock-Pot.” Predictably, Live Action, and subsequently other anti-abortion groups, have seized upon this statement and used it to further their campaign of what might be called the “Gosnellization” of individuals who provide later abortions—that is, to claim that Carhart and his colleagues are no different than the rogue doctor now on trial in Philadelphia for dangerous and illegal practices.
But Leroy Carhart and Kermit Gosnell could not be more different as abortion providers. As the New York Times pointed out in its coverage of this incident, “[T]he video provides no evidence of illegal action or subpar medical techniques.” Tracy Weitz, my University of California, San Francisco colleague, further pointed out to the paper the evident concern that Carhart exhibited toward the (imposter) patient, and offered this context to his “Crock-Pot” remark: “Doctors struggle to find terminology to help a client understand what’s happening, and while it may seem wrong to us, it may be appropriate for that conversation.” (The recentfilm After Tiller also amply demonstrates Dr. Carhart’s compassionate relationship with patients.)
What will be the upshot of this latest Live Action incident? Dr. Carhart, who previously provided later abortions in the clinic of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas before Tiller was assassinated, will not be deterred from his “mission” to carry on his friend’s work, as the former military surgeon often puts it. In the years since he decided to devote himself full-time to abortion work, Carhart has had extremists burn down his barn with 17 horses inside, seen the state of Nebraska pass a law deliberately aimed at preventing him from performing abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation, and is subject to constant protestors at his two clinics as well as vilification in anti-abortion media.
But while Dr. Carhart will continue with his work, I do fear that a possible consequence of these well-publicized Live Action videos may be a chilling effect on the free and open conversation between clinic staff and patients that is such an important part of abortion care. Should this occur, I have no doubt the anti-abortion movement will declaim self-righteously about the “coldness” and “impersonality” of abortion facilities.
Star Parker, CURE Exploit Gosnell Case to Promote Debunked ‘Black Genocide’ Narrative
On Tuesday, Star Parker is hosting a Gosnell pearl clutchathon, during which she will promote virulent, racist, and untrue facts about abortion in the Black community, with the help of far-right white conservatives like John Ashcroft and Ed Meese.
President Obama, you see, doesn’t care about Black women or the plight of Black urban America. Star Parker and her “urban renewal” organization, on the other hand, do. Or so they would have you believe. A review of CURE’s advisory board roster, however, tells a different story.
John Ashcroft—yes, that John Ashcroft—is on CURE’s advisory board. John Ashcroft is well-known for being the songbird attorney general during the Bush administration who taught Americans how to properly fear Muslims. Before that, however, Ashcroft served as attorney general for the state of Missouri, where he bravely fought tooth and nail to keep St. Louis and Kansas City schools segregated. So bravely did he fight against school desegregation, that the official supervising the racial integration plan called him “obstructionist.” In addition, Harvard professor Gary Orfield said that Ashcroft “had no positive vision and constantly stirred up racial divisions” over the issue, ultimately calling Ashcroft “an unrelenting opponent of doing anything in St. Louis.” A man who opposes “doing anything” in underserved communities is just the sort of guy we need to help poverty-stricken urban areas, wouldn’t you agree?
Two bills that could radically change how teens access pregnancy terminations are nearly on their way to the governor for her approval.
An Oklahoma bill that would force parents to provide written documentation and have a valid ID to consent for their daughter or ward to have an abortion, and which would prohibit teens from seeking judicial bypass anywhere outside their county has received final approval from the state house. It now heads to Republican Gov. Mary Fallin’s desk for signature. Another bill, which would eliminate all judicial bypass except in cases when someone has been impregnated by a family member, is expected to be heard this week and will likely follow the same path.
If signed, the rules will make Oklahoma one of the most onerous states for teens seeking an abortion, making it difficult for youth from low-income families to terminate a pregnancy, even with parental consent. By requiring both a valid ID and notarized paperwork attesting to the relationship between teen and guardian, the bills add additional time and financial considerations to an already established 48-hour waiting period, potentially forcing some teens to delay getting an abortion or to continue the pregnancy.
Teens are quickly becoming the new battle ground for anti-choice lawmakers intent on using consent to cut off access to safe reproductive health care. A proposed bill in North Carolinatakes the before unseen step of requiring parental consent for all reproductive health care, including diagnosis and treatment of STIs, pregnancy confirmation and prenatal care, and pregnancy protection, all as a means of forcing teens into a government mandated parental relationship. That bill has been opposed by both health-care providers and reproductive rights advocates.
In the early stages of pregnancy, there are two lives in the balance, but one of them is a potential life; it can only become viable over time and at the expense of the other.
Only that mother knows what the cost to her will be and whether she can afford it or not.I defy anyone, male or female, to look my 17-year-old self in the eye and tell her that they feel personally entitled to deny her the right to regain control of her own body, that they will force her to endure an extension of that rape for the sake of their world view.
But that’s what it means to pass laws that frame the kinds of restrictions our legislature are discussing right now.
— TW: I Was Raped When I Was 17. Where Were the Abortion Experts and Commentators? (via forthecatholicgirls)(via antiprolife)
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) knows that with a Democratic majority in the Senate, the chances of a bill restricting access to safe abortion care is unlikely to go anywhere, but that fact is not stopping the Senator from proposing one. Like his fellow anti-choice politicians in the House, Senator Lee, together with Senators Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania), is using the criminal trial of Philadelphia physician Dr. Kermit Gosnell to propose a Senate resolution to call for more restrictions on safe abortion care.
The resolution calls for the investigation of all clinics that provide abortion, as well as a claim of “compelling governmental interest in protecting the lives of unborn children beginning at least from the stage at which substantial medical evidence indicates that they are capable of feeling pain.”
The resolution also attempts to slip in support for the notion that fertilized eggs should have the same legal protections as fully born persons, in case there was any doubt that language about “protecting women” was nothing more than window dressing.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, religion, and conscience. But international human rights standards do not protect our right to express those thoughts or that conscience in a manner that infringes on other people’s human rights.
