Tag: abortion

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Activism History Society

The suffragettes’ fight for equality

Liked A hunger striker’s medal, a Danish love token, and Hello Kitty by Monica McLaughlin (Dearest)

The medal above was awarded to suffragette Ada Wright (1861-1939) by the English women’s suffrage organization The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), in recognition of her efforts in the campaign to grant women the right to vote… Wright was a small, slight woman who was tireless in her work for the campaign, contributing both funds and action.

The WSPU’s motto was “deeds, not words,” and in addition to organizing rallies and protesting outside Parliament, they also advocated more aggressive means of demonstration. Members smashed windows, set buildings on fire, and assaulted the police — sometimes in a deliberate effort to be arrested and therefore gain more publicity. When incarcerated, the women often went on hunger strikes and were brutally force fed.

In a bit of serendipity, last night I reread one of my favorite books, The Suffragette Scandal, about an investigative journalist and advocate for women’s rights — and this morning read this auction newsletter about a real-life suffragette’s hunger strike and advocacy.

Reading about the hell these women went through to change public sentiment makes it all the more distressing that a hundred years later, women’s rights — and women ourselves — are still under siege. And voting rights — even the very concept of democracy — seems at risk in America.

Continue reading “The suffragettes’ fight for equality”
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Political Commentary

Abortion is not murder

Replied to 21 South Carolina GOP Lawmakers Propose Death Penalty for Women Who Have Abortions (rollingstone.com)

It’s not just a lone extremist: The bill has 21 co-sponsors in the state’s House of Representatives

It is religious extremism to say that women deserve to die for a tiny nonviable bundle of cells without a visible embryo. Only belief in a soul beginning at conception makes that make any amount of sense.

Is this 3″ bundle of cells more important than me? Should a woman die for this?

See also:

Our Rage is Not Hysterical

Categories
Health Political Commentary

Do men think about whether they want kids every day?

Liked Don’t Show Up for Men Who Won’t Show Up for You by Jill Filipovic (Jill Filipovic)

Democratic voters were fired up about abortion — the number of Dem voters who listed abortion as their #1 issue far outpaced Dem voters who listed anything else.

In the midterms, an astounding 72% of women under 30 voted for Democrats. Among men the same age, it was 54%. These gaps persist with age: Among women 30-44, 57% voted for Dems, while just 43% of men did.

I highlight these age ranges because these are the people getting pregnant.

I am a woman who does not want and has never wanted children. This is an unpopular choice in our culture. But I must renew this decision on a daily basis when I take my birth control pill* to prevent pregnancy. Every day of my adult life, I have started my morning by making the choice not to be a mother again. 

Even for those not on the pill, reproduction is embedded in the typical adult woman’s physical lived experience, with thirty-odd years of monthly reminders of our fertility.

Maybe men also think about having kids every day. Without the daily reminder, I probably wouldn’t that often. I’m guessing most don’t? I hope not, because if they do and half of American men still care more about tax rates and gun rights than women’s right to choose whether to have (more**) kids or not, that’s even more depressing.

It is a very, very complicated thing to hold that a man can love you personally — as your father, your brother, your partner — but also devalue women as a class. Even more difficult is to truly understand that when he devalues women as a class, that includes you.

I see how women are being treated in Iran *today* and know how lucky I am to live in a Blue state. And I fear the American evangelicals who are just like the religious extremists in power in Iran, who want America to be a Christian nation so they can control women’s bodies and minds. They are chipping away at us, little by little. The courts recently ruled businesses don’t have to cover pRep in their insurance plans because they’re allowed “not to support the gay lifestyle.” It isn’t much of a stretch to extend that to birth control: they will paint women who use birth control as promiscuous and they will come for it.

*I could switch to another birth control method that doesn’t require daily use, but even with the annoyance of remembering to take it every day, the pill still seems like my best option. The side effects are minimal, and I suspect it might help prevent hormonal migraines which seem to run in the family. I know many women with an IUD and every one has told a story of agonizing pain to have it inserted, so I’d rather take the daily chore and need to get my prescription renewed annually.

I just want men to recognize just how much thought and effort women put into reproductive choice, constantly. Abortion is a last defense when our other tools fail. See also: who our culture considers responsible for contraception

** The majority of people who get abortions already have children.

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Activism Political Commentary Society

What does life look like?

Liked Why did images of early pregnancy cause such a firestorm on TikTok? by Lux Alptraum (The Verge)

Images of what an early pregnancy looks like rattled through social media recently, creating an unexpected backlash for abortion rights commentators.

@auntiekilljoy #greenscreen they need to show these images at every political debate about abortion #feminism #abortion #fyp ♬ original sound – Jessica Valenti

(link to TikTok)

I took an ethics class in college, and one of our topics was abortion. Tl;dr it’s hard to argue that an unimplanted blastocyst — a tiny bundle of cells that grows for a few days before attaching to the uterine wall — is a human being entitled to the same rights as me, a fully formed adult*. And even after implantation, the tissue doesn’t look like what we’d think of as a human for a long time, per the above TikTok.

* Basically it requires belief in a soul. I don’t believe in souls. So passing laws that prohibit drugs that inhibit implantation — which are based on this belief — means politicians are imposing someone else’s religious beliefs on me. Which is not constitutional.

Basically anti-abortion advocates are lying and manipulating the public by using images from the very small portion of later-term abortions to weigh on people’s emotions and take away women’s right to an abortion before then. They know that it’s hard to show most people that tiny bundle of tissue and tell them it has more rights than they do.

And this is why truth matters.

 

From the MYA network:

You might be surprised to learn that pregnancies nine weeks and under have no visible embryo.  And at six weeks of pregnancy the so-called “heartbeat” is just electrical activity of cells, before an actual heart is formed.  Approximately 85% of all abortions in the US happen before 9 weeks of pregnancy.

Categories
Health Political Commentary Society

Whose responsibility is contraception?

Liked Vasectomy: The US men embracing permanent birth control (bbc.com)

Google Trends tracked a huge uptick in US searches for ‘vasectomy’, along with the related search terms “Roe” and “abortion”; search volume was even higher in places with trigger laws. A report from telehealth research company Innerbody Research showed searches for “where can I get a vasectomy” increased by 850% in the days after the news, with the biggest jumps in conservative states Texas and Florida. One practice in Florida told CBS News that the number of child-free men getting vasectomies under the age of 30 had doubled since the ruling.

Responsibility for birth control, even for long-term couples, has long fallen disproportionately to women; female sterilisation, oral contraceptives, IUDs and other options for women remain the most common forms of birth control in the US.

Honestly I was surprised at the breakdown of birth control. Nineteen percent rely on getting their tubes tied versus nine percent counting on their partner getting a vasectomy. Thirteen percent are on the pill, and another thirteen use the shot, ring and IUDs. (As of 2017.)

Littlejohn says real societal change will require a different line of thinking. “As long as we see this as something that men are doing to ‘lend a hand to their partners’ and being noble, in service of their partners’ not being able to prevent pregnancy,” she says, it perpetuates a narrative that men aren’t the default responsible party for contraception.

I like that conservatives are all “lol we’re going to make you have all the babies 😂 enjoy poverty suckers” and dudes are like “😳 wait I didn’t sign up for this.” Evangelicals are so out of touch with society they think everyone’s a misogynist like them who wants to treat their women like broodmares and have a dozen kids. Thankfully for women, that is not the case.

I am scared they’re coming for our birth control next, but I doubt they’ll restrict vasectomies because misogyny — they aren’t liable to give up control over their own bodies, they just want to control ours.

Lol ten years ago I wrote a shitty NaNo novel that was like a Hunger Games mashup with forced sterilization and forced birth and it was not nearly brutal enough. I’m someone who’s well off and lives in a blue state and likely will always have access to the contraception of my choice — and it still fucking sucks to live in a USA where I have to question if that will change. So I can see the appeal in a permanent option that would protect my decision not to have kids.

Categories
Activism Political Commentary Society

A right contingent on political whims is not a right

Quoted Roxane Gay: The Roe v. Wade Draft Decision Shows It’s Time to Rage by Roxane Gay (nytimes.com)

We can’t let this country become a hollow theocracy.

“We should not live in a country where bodily autonomy can be granted or taken away by nine political appointees… Any civil right contingent upon political whims is not actually a civil right.”

—Roxane Gay

Our rage is not hysterical.

Categories
Political Commentary Society

Our Rage is Not Hysterical

Bookmarked Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical by Rebecca Traister (The Cut)

For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians — not just on the right, but members of my own party — and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.

Also about how, for years, I’ve listened to Democratic politicians distance themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and insisting it should be rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to be a crucial, legal cornerstone of comprehensive health care for women, people with uteruses, and their families. I have seethed as generations of Democrats have argued that if we could just get past abortion and focus instead on economic issues, we’d be better off. They never seem to get that abortion is an economic issue, and that what they think of as economic issues — from wages and health care to housing and education policy — are at the very heart of the reproductive justice movement, which understands access to abortion to be one (pivotal!) part of a far broader set of circumstances that determine if, when, under what circumstances, and with what resources human beings might have and raise children.

In vast portions of this country, Roe might as well not exist already.

And still those who are mad about, have been driven mad by, these injustices have been told that their fury is baseless, fictional, made of chewing gum and recycled copies of Our Bodies Ourselves.

Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express it, but it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and political change.

And this is an old article…

When I think about the religious asshole scumbag pieces of shit who want to control my body and police my sexuality, I can literally feel the rage simmering up inside me. (It’s not about the fucking babies. If it was, where is the universal health care to ensure mothers have healthy pregnancies, UBI for mothers so they can stay home with infants if they choose, funding for WIC so babies and kids eat healthy meals, healthy school lunches and breakfast free for all kids, parental leave for both parents for an actual reasonable amount of time on par with actually modern countries so that both parents care for kids and women of childbearing age aren’t discriminated against in hiring and promotions, and free daycare and preschool so women can return to work? Where is support and protection for part-time work so parents can care for kids and have a career with benefits like a human fucking being? Where are the demands for the things we know reduce abortions, like free contraception and safe sex education? Fuck anyone who wants to get rid of abortion without implementing all and I mean all of the above. They don’t give a flying fuck about babies if they don’t want to help them live healthy lives out of poverty once they’re actually born.)