Senators in Indiana and Pennsylvania are trying to pass bills that would allow pharmacists to “conscientiously object” to filling birth control prescriptions.
So, uh… since when are the decisions my doctor and I make about my personal reproductive health any of my pharmacist’s business? How many goddamn hoops should women have to jump through for a little control over their own reproduction?
In other news, the birth control pill evidently reduces the risk of developing ovarian cancer. Groovy.
If you were to ask a conservative man what he would do if someone restrained him and forcefully extracted his bone marrow, his answer would probably make mention of a veritable arsenal kept in his cabinet. He’d likely feel perfectly justified in killing any assailant who would dare to make any use of his body whatsoever without his consent. Whether or not the assailant needed the marrow to save his life would make very little difference.
Why? Because we have a unique right to our own bodies. If anyone wants something of them, they go through us. As much as our homes and property mean to us, the right to ownership over things is nothing compared to our right to bodily autonomy. This is why rape is rape and not ‘theft of sexual services.’ It’s why we don’t draft organ donors or force the population to relinquish a pint of blood every eight weeks. It’s also why forcing pregnancy is illegal and abortion isn’t.
The “pro-life” method of getting around this is claiming that pregnancy and motherhood are the natural purpose of women, and therefore a blessing, regardless of the circumstances. It’s bullshit. Anyone with any respect at all for women knows that each of us have our own hopes and goals in our lives, and sometimes they just don’t include pregnancy or children. For some women, it’s the ultimate joy in life, and for some of us it isn’t. Telling a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy that pregnancy is pregnancy and therefore a blessing is like telling a rape victim that sex is sex.
Here’s the bottom line: whatever the moral dilemma over humanity, personhood, and what that means for a fetus, women have the right to abortion because they have a right to decide what resides in and lives off of their bodies. Many pro-choicers* do in fact see a moral crisis in aborting a late term fetus that may have the capacity for feeling, but they understand that the law shouldn’t force someone to do ‘the right thing’ when it would effectively destroy their basic human rights.
*Even Amanda Marcotte, scourge of the religious right, sees a moral issue with killing a sentient fetus. It just doesn’t mean that women’s rights can be instantly negated.
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If you’re a man and you’ve had a lover terminate a pregnancy, Greg Hasek is a licensed counselor who knows how to make you suffer.
First, he’ll tell you to draw a picture of what your child would look like today if he hadn’t been killed.
Nothing yet? On goes the sentimental music. Tears in Heaven, maybe.
“Guys can’t withstand it,” Hasek says. You might start to weep.
But if you’re still not feeling it (or as Hasek would put it, “still in denial” about the abortion’s impact), he might take you to a playground and tell you to imagine how old your child would be, how he might run around and play with the other kids - if he were here.
The non-medical term for this is ‘messing with your head’; the medical one is malpractice. Therapists like Hasek (who happens to be the executive director of an Oregon clinic) are in a position of power and trust in relation to their clients, and when they coerce feelings of loss, they can easily make them a reality.
And this is how you create a “Post-Abortion Syndrome” man to rally for your cause: you create the image of a wonderful (born) son or daughter, you encourage the man to feel connected and entitled to it, and then you convince him that he’s “lost” this imaginary child. In other words, you use your psychological expertise to create an unquenchable desire for something that has never and can’t ever exist. Men like Hasek have formed a profession around cultivating pain under the guise of “healing.”
This isn’t anything new, of course - “post-abortive” counselors working with pro-life organizations have been using similar tactics for years to turn shaken women into self-proclaimed repentant murderers. But getting your significant other to regret your abortion is a relatively new trick. Let’s hope these people never hook up with the Dog Whisperer; they might be able to get your poodle to regret your abortion, too.
For all the proud American flags and boisterous bumper stickers, I don’t think the religious right gets it.
Like when they suggest that marrying someone of the same sex is tantamount to marrying a corpse or animal.
Or when they insist that allowing terminally ill patients the option of choosing their own death is the same as government-sponsored genocide of “unworthy” groups.
Or, for that matter, when they suggest that the life of a zygote, embryo, or fetus with no conscious brain activity is equal to that of a sentient woman.
Someone, please tell me - where is the disconnect here? Why does consent mean absolutely nothing to these people? Why is human will and pursuit of happiness absolutely valueless?
How can anyone be so thick as to suggest that marriage is anything less than a deep commitment and a legal union, one that anyone in their right mind would recognize cannot be consented to by lifeless bodies and/or animals? Honestly. It’s a whole new realm of stupid. Even the most dimwitted of the Republican tribe should be able to comprehend that when you take one “I do,” out of a marriage, you don’t have one.
Advocating for the right to choose life and death on our own terms is about as far from advocating murder or genocide as you can get. And hey, even the occasional freeper gets it:
Freeper 1:
You have always had the ability to make that decision - if you really want to head out of here, you can breathe into a plastic bag that’s over your head, swim too far out to be able to return, shoot yourself, OD on any number of drugs.
You can do all of those things with a healthy body. The miserably dying who would want to end their pain often can’t do anything but lay in bed crapping themselves and pressing the morphine button harder.
For those who can do it themselves, brains and hair all over the wall and a closed casket funeral aren’t a very kind thing to do to their friends and survivors.
You certainly have a point with the slippery slope from choice to die to obligation to die, but as far as I’m concerned the obligation to suffer is worse.
What breaks my heart most of all is the Catholic stance against Amnesty International’s new policy advocating abortion access for rape victims in regions like Darfur.
One survivor’s testimonial:
“After six days some of the girls were released. But the others, as young as eight years old were kept there. Five to six men would rape us in rounds, one after the other for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this, he disowned me.”
Another woman -
“Women will not tell you easily if they have been raped. In our culture, it is a shame. Women hide this in their hearts so that men don’t hear about it.”
From an Amnesty International press release (emphasis mine):
Women who have become pregnant as a result of rape are most likely to suffer further abuses of their rights. There is the trauma of the rape itself as well as the difficulties associated with carrying and caring with a child who is the result of violence. In the specific social context of Darfur, in a society where rape is considered a taboo and a shame for the survivor of this violence, the child who is a result of rape will mostly be considered as a child of the “enemy”, a “Janjawid child”. Survivors of rape and their children are most likely to be ostracized by their community and married women most likely to be rejected by their husbands. Women may feel forced to abandon the child who is a result of rape and face another traumatic decision to make.
The communities of the women raped do not seem ready to accept the need to provide their full support for these women and possibly the child who could result from such violation. In group and face-to-face interviews conducted by Amnesty International in May 2004, women and men said that while they would accept raped women back into the community, the child as a potential result of rape would not be accepted. This leads women who have become pregnant as a result of rape to a situation of further ostracism, trauma and abuses of their rights. The lack of medical and psychological care facilities to deal with survivors of rape in the refugee camps in Chad and the many more victims in the IDP settlements in Darfur further compounds this situation.
For many men in the refugee camps the human rights violation of rape seems to directly translate into a humiliation against themselves and the group they belong to.
This is addition to the psychological trauma of carrying a “Janjawid child” as the result of being brutally raped. This is in addition to the dangers of childbirth, many of which are exacerbated in abused rape victims.
The Catholic community doesn’t live in some lovely fantasy world where women and children don’t suffer or die from rape and its consequences. They just don’t care. The message is this: when you become pregnant, your most basic needs become irrelevant.
As Mindelle Jacobs wrote in her comment to the Edmonton Sun, “Zygotes matter. Women don’t.”
They just don’t get it.
One of the facets of pro-life argument that I absolutely CANNOT stand is the idea that we poor, mentally-unstable females must be kept from abortion for our own good. Whenever I hear it, I get the distinct mental image of someone gently stroking a nervous cat before casually offering it a bowl of antifreeze. The pro-life establishment has never been interested in upholding women’s welfare, and when it given the opportunity, it will make every effort to endanger women who would dare go against its wishes.
For example, Tom Minnery (Vice President of Focus on the Family) on the “Partial-Birth Abortion” ban:
“The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”
Yes, Minnery applauds the fact that women will be endangered by the legislation his organization fought tooth and nail for. Tell women you have their best interests at heart, then push politics to make their medical care as risky as possible. Groups like Focus on the Family love to point out how dangerous abortion supposedly is, but it’s not every day that they publicly pat themselves on the back for doing their part to make it that way. Fortunately for pro-lifers, they often don’t have to bother with using the political system to force doctors to perform more dangerous procedures. Spreading lies and misinformation about current abortion techniques usually suffices. Rachel at Women’s Health News has a wonderful informative post that debunks the recent pro-life myth that medical abortions induced with RU-486 are killing women “at an alarming rate” and cause infertility and miscarriages.
The plain and simple statistical fact that pro-lifers NEVER admit is that women are exponentially more likely to die from childbirth than from abortion. But while anti-abortion advocates try to use the inherent risks of abortion to criminalize it, pro-choicers trust women to weigh the risks themselves and make their own decisions. None of us will try to limit births simply because they can be dangerous. The idea of it sounds ludicrous, but then, so should the idea of limiting women’s reproductive freedoms for their own good.
Amnesty International is reaffirming its stand in favor of abortion access for victims of rape, sexual assault, and incest, and in cases when pregnancy poses a risk to their lives or a “grave risk” to their health. The policy change (Amnesty previously called itself “neutral” on abortion - it opposed forced abortions, but neither attacked nor supported voluntary abortion) was inspired by regions like Darfur, where rape is being used as a weapon of war.
“Amnesty International stands alongside the victims and survivors of human rights violations. Our policy reflects our obligation of solidarity as a human rights movement with, for example, the rape survivor in Darfur who, because she is left pregnant as a result of the enemy, is further ostracised [sic] by her community,” said Kate Gilmore (Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International).
Amnesty International is still far from acknowledging the right to abortion as fundamental in defending each individual’s bodily integrity, but it’s taken a huge step in the right direction. Countless victims will finally have all of their options open to them. Amnesty is also calling for an end to the criminalization of abortion “to ensure women have access to heath care when complications arise from abortion and to defend women’s access to abortion … when their health or human rights are in danger.”
Ratzinger is not a happy Pope:
The church, which considers abortion to be murder and never justified, has urged Catholic organizations to withdraw their support for
Amnesty over the policy. The Vatican says Amnesty has “betrayed its mission.”
If forcing pregnancy on battered, assaulted women so they cannot return to their communities is “the mission,” then it’s about time it was betrayed. If sentencing innocent women to death by keeping abortion out of reach for those in risk is “the mission,” then we need to drop the damn mission. It’s just tragic that religious leaders are so desperate to keep victims of human rights violations in the dark.
According to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s “Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,” any woman who would have an abortion is batshit insane - or, as he put it, “psychologically impaired.” This comes in response to the question that has been plaguing pro-lifers recently: if abortion is made illegal, what penalties should the women face? Apparently none at all, since we fragile little womenfolk are obviously all emotional wrecks who can’t be held responsible for our own choices. It’s a wonder we can tie our own shoelaces without a man to oversee it, isn’t it?
Question of the Day: How far do you have to stick your head up your own ass before shamelessly classifying “Disagrees with me” as a mental defect?
Via Pandagon.
As far as reproductive rights and information are concerned, I’ve been feeling more and more like women in the USA are being slowly cornered, fed into the cattle chutes, poked with the electric prod, and pushed up to the bullshit troughs.
Take a look at Missouri’s brand new legislation, for example:
[x] People affiliated with abortion providers can no longer teach or supply materials for sex education courses in public schools, even though they are already instructed not to discuss abortion. Planned Parenthood will no longer be allowed to offer schools free materials.
[x] “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” will receive state-funded grants and are authorized to promote themselves with a public awareness campaign. Last year, an investigation conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives found that 87 percent of the CPCs receiving federal funds provided false or misleading information. Here’s just one example (of dozens*) cited in the report:
Having a baby is a normal process and what it does is fulfills a woman. It is fulfilling one of the roles that she has. Abortion is the exact opposite; she is doing something totally contrary to what her role is. That’s why it has such an emotional impact on women.
[x] Abortion clinics have been reclassified as “ambulatory surgical centers,” which means that several of them will face million-dollar renovations. At least one office may have to quit offering its abortion services even though all of its abortions are induced by medication, not surgically.
Not surprisingly, Missouri is also where I saw the “Embryos are Babies!” billboard that I so shamelessly spoofed.
*Here are a few more quotes from the report:
One center compared the experience of having an abortion to the experience of going to war, analogizing the post-traumatic stress experienced after an abortion to that seen in soldiers after Vietnam, and said that it “is something that anyone who’s had an abortion is sure to suffer from.”
One center told the caller that there is an “extremely high, increased risk of breast cancer” that “can be as much as an 80% increase depending upon how the risk factors fall into place.” A second center stated that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer by 50%. A third center asserted that an abortion elevates the average lifetime risk of breast cancer by 50% and that more abortions increase the risk even more.
Several centers described the risk of abortion-induced infertility as common or high. One told the caller that damage from abortion could lead to “many miscarriages” or to “permanent damage” so “you wouldn’t be able to carry.” This center stated that this is “common” and happens “a lot.”
“Abortion is an act that takes the life of an innocent human child,” said Erik Whittington, American Life League’s youth outreach director. “It is shameful that Christians would rally around the physical needs of the poor and ignore the deaths of untold millions of babies. Abortion is poverty and the number one priority of our day should be its demise.”
Shameful to rally around the “physical needs” of the poor? Wow.
One question that seems obvious to the sane observer is this: Wouldn’t eliminating poverty reduce the need for abortion and drastically improve the lives of millions of born people? Wouldn’t this approach cut abortion at its source - the need for it? Doesn’t it seem blatantly cruel to advocate forced pregnancy over prevention and a boost to the standard of living for all?
Short answer: yes. Long answer:
The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level ($9,570 for a single woman with no children) is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level (44 vs. 10 abortions per 1,000 women)
As one commenter at Pandagon noted:
When I volunteered for PP, I saw many women come and go. Most of the poor women that came for abortions scrimped, saved, begged and borrowed to pay for it. Most were willing and wanting to use birth control. Not having a car, not having easy access to the clinics during open hours since they work multiple jobs, not being able to outright buy birth control at a nearby pharmacy- many of them were trying and trying really fucking hard to not get pregnant, but birth control access isn’t EASY for poor women. It can be hard enough for regular women nowadays with asshat pharmacists. You’re basically asking poor people to be PERFECT while giving those that have more access and more ability the right to be imperfect. you’re putting MORE burden on the poor, on those that are most likely to be shafted to access of things like education and birth control and educational opportunities.
By saying that the poor should forgo sex if they can’t afford a child, you’re saying that the poor don’t deserve one of the most important elements of human existence- the need for companionship and intimacy.
So why aren’t they pushing to eliminate poverty?
Because, of course, that takes money. A pregnant woman should be forced through hell and high water if it means she stays pregnant, but the average taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay a dime more to ensure that she has adequate access to birth control, health care, and opportunities to further her education and career. Such is justice for this brand of “Christianity.”
Via Feministe.
I no longer have any optimistic doubt over the blatant maliciousness of most “pro-life” leaders. That’s gone, folks. These people have sunk far beyond a heart two sizes too small and straight into compassion limbo. There’s a rift in the antiabortion crowd forming around the “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban, and it boils down to one simple question:
One group contends that it doesn’t go far enough. After all, when a pregnancy starts to go seriously wrong, many women have access to comprehensive health care - including abortion. When you genuinely believe that any uppity bitch who would dare end her own pregnancy should at least have to stab herself with a coat-hanger to do so, banning just one of the safer procedures seems terribly insufficient.
Carhart is even “more wicked than Roe” because it is “not a ban, but a partial-birth abortion manual” that affirms the legality of late-term abortions “as long as you follow its guidelines,” the ads said.
But the cluster of assholes on the other side of the rift is much more optimistic about the danger to women inherent in this legislation:
Doctors adopted the late-term procedure “out of convenience,” Minnery added. “The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”
Kill or mutilate a few women and make them an example to the rest. Tie the doctors’ hands so that they must choose between illegally performing the safest procedure, legally performing a far more dangerous one, or simply leaving desperate women to deal with serious health risks on their own.
And these people call themselves “pro-life.” Disgusting.
Hat tip, Pandagon.