Kathryn Joyce’s new look at the adoption industry, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, contains within its pages true horror stories. Perhaps most shockingly, the book details what appears to be the long-term abuse of a group of Liberian orphans “adopted” into a life of virtual slavery in Tennessee—starved, hit, manipulated, and isolated by “parents” practicing an extreme brand of back-to-the-land Christianity.

But Joyce, through intensive reporting around the world, also tells the stories of “orphans” who have actual families, even mothers, back home and who were adopted under false auspices, as well women in the United States who are manipulated into relinquishing children for adoption bycrisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).

Throughout the book, these dynamics of exploitation are recreated on a macro scale as the increasing drive for Westerners, often people of faith, to adopt orphans keeps feeding into, and off of, a global system of poverty, corruption, and mistreatment of women and children. Joyce’s work touches on bigger social issues, like the intersection of capitalism with reproduction, the role of religion in shaping policy, and the way conventional—and even inspirational—narratives of care and charity intersect with old paradigms of oppression and power.

Joyce recently spoke to RH Reality Check about how the movement she chronicles relates to abortion politics and the treatment of biological families of adoptees at home and abroad.

Read more—>

ALL Doctors should be required to train in all facets of reproductive health — including family doctors! Agree? Sign and spread the word.

A majority of U.S. women get their basic health care from a family physician or other primary care provider, and often that includes reproductive health care. Especially in rural and low-income areas, family physicians do it all! They not only provide birth control but also provide prenatal care, deliver babies, manage miscarriages, counsel patients about unintended pregnancies, and, increasingly, offer pregnancy termination so that their patients do not have to travel long distances and see unfamiliar doctors for these services.

ACGME’s motivations are legitimate:  It seeks to simplify the rules for the nation’s family medicine residency programs—numbering over 450—and to allow for more creativity and flexibility. In some areas of practice, this makes sense. Many programs will continue to teach contraception; it will depend on the culture of the institution. However, residency programs based in religiously-affiliated hospitals (which operate nearly 20 percent of inpatient community-hospital beds in the U.S.), will most likely drop birth control training immediately.

Because the ACGME currently requires birth control training, religiously-affiliated institutions must figure out a way to comply. Many rotate their residents through external clinics to learn these skills—which are essential since 99 percent of women in the United States who have ever had sexual intercourse have used a method of contraception other than natural family planning at some point in their lives. Without this requirement, residents in religiously-affiliated programs may get no training at all in contraception.

If you believe all FAMILY doctors should be trained on ALL parts of FAMILY PLANNING, click through to easily send an email.

What we see when Priests for Life’s National Director Father Frank Pavone and Youth Outreach Director Brian Kemper are together.

What caption would you put?

queerability:

Image is a picture of a married couple.

“As a clergyperson who officiates at same-sex weddings and offers the blessing of my church, I feel that my religious liberty is under threat. Why do the prayers of clergy in other churches matter more than my own?” - Rev. Emily C. Heath

From Believe Out Loud

(via cactustreemotel)

Watch the video and read more

According to Pastor Morecraft, the consequences of being a “foolish person who is unwilling to live by the Word of God” is to “become a slave of somebody who is godly and who is wise.”

Pastor Joe Morecraft’s theocratic vision of building a Christian nation is one more reason why freedom-loving Americans must vigilantly guard our cherished Separation of Church and State.

Self-Certification and the Contraceptive Coverage Rule: What Does it Mean for an Institution to “Hold Itself Out as Religious?”

In court papers, Notre Dame detailed how it segregated and tracked the use of the taxpayer funds to ensure they were not used for religious purposes. Among those expenses Notre Dame categorized as “secular” were “director’s and associate director’s salaries and benefits.” Those benefits presumably include medical benefits. Compare that to Notre Dame’s lawsuit challenging the contraceptive coverage mandate, in which Notre Dame claims offering particular health plans is an exercise of its religious belief.  (See page 38 here.) Health plans are “secular” when the University seeks taxpayer money, but an “exercise of religion” when it doesn’t want to adhere to generally applicable law.

Amanda Marcotte on NIMBYism and hypocrisy from anti-choice conservatives

Obviously, all these abortion restrictions have nothing to do with life, but, as with the quest to eliminate access to contraception and the attempts to kill off comprehensive sex education, are more about fundamentalist Christians trying to impose their anti-sex views on the rest of us. That’s well-established, of course, even as anti-choice nuts online routinely and unconvincingly deny their anti-sex views. But, in a sense, it’s even nastier and uglier than that, because as much as anti-choicers are really pushing an anti-sex agenda, they are doing so with the full understanding that they will never actually convince people to stop having sex for pleasure. That ship has sailed; the sexual revolution was well underway before the birth control pill and legal abortion, and it’s unlikely that taking those things away will change that. In fact, one reason they tend to be cagey about their anti-sex views is that they know that people will think they’re mad if they’re too blunt about them.

So really, what’s at the heart of the anti-choice movement is an attempt to create a hypocritical society where non-procreative sex is officially condemned but everyone is doing it anyway. They also intend to create some scapegoats, primarily women and especially poorer women, who will be made to suffer from botched illegal abortions and forced childbirth to pay for the sexual “sins” engaged in by the rest of the community, including most fundamentalist Christians. It’s like looking back on the era of Prohibition and longing for a system where everyone is breaking the law, but only a handful of mostly underprivileged people are paying the price. Except even worse, because far more Americans have non-procreative, recreational sex than ever drank alcohol on the regular.

What is NIMBYism?

NIMBY is an acronym for the phrase “Not In My Back Yard.”