Kaili Joy Gray asks yet another big WTF to what she calls Feminism™. The issue? What one would imagine to be the premier pro-choice/abortion-rights organization in America, NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica, waited till... the week before the election to comment on Mississippi Initiative 26, the so-called "Personhood Amendment" that would have outlawed not only abortion and stem-cell research but miscarriages and as many forms of non-barrier birth control as opponents could think of.

Seriously? Just a week before? Yeah, seriously, just a week before.

[T]hank god NARAL sweeps in, just days before the election, to educate us about something we apparently know nothing about. Excellent timing, isn't it? Because if we are really as ignorant as Nancy Keenan thinks we are, a few days is plenty of notice to launch an effective campaign to defeat the bill, isn't it?

Source: Daily Kos

What really seems to chap Gray's ass is the headline of NARAL president Nancy Keenan's press release at Huffington Post: "The War on Women You Haven't Heard of."

Seriously? Yes, seriously.

Just for the record, a) whereas Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment has been going wall to wall since roughly minutes after it was first introduced back in March of 2011, and b) whereas even the National Organization for Women, which can sometimes be, um, slow to respond was mentioning the the amendment last summer, and c) whereas even the NARAL branch Pro-Choice Ohio was all over the admendment, a fairly detailed search of the NARAL site suggests that, indeed, the organization that's nominally the premier pro-choice organization and certainly one of the biggest sources of pro-choice donations first mentioned Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment on November 1st! Seven days before the election.

Oops. Except Keenan mentioned it first in the Huffington Post. At NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica it was first mentioned... the day after the election!

Which kind of leaves me in the same camp as Kaily Joy Gray. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if NARAL does not want to use its public platform and fundraising prowess to advance the cause of choice, I know some people who would like to borrow it for a time, provided they could see how it could be made to do something.

Because seven days before election night?!?!?! Sweet mother of pearl!

Lest you think NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica focuses only on choice at the national level, and prefers to leave minor issues like Initiative 26 to state an local chapters, Gray points out (correctly as far as I can tell) that the national organization has been equally mum on any of the several groups in Congress and the Senate who are currently circulating "Personhood" amendments to the Constitution.

Which leaves me wondering (as does Gray) whether NARAL intends to wait to start fundraising organizing till seven days before Congress tries to pass "personhood" Amendment, or perhaps till seven days before the 38th (and therefore last) state ratifies?

!#%*&%@!

Jill Filipovic of Feministe says

Too many women are dying in the United States while having babies. Amnesty International details the American maternal health care crisis, calling it part of a systematic violation of women’s rights. Funny how “pro-lifers” aren’t exactly latching on to the cause.

She said it here.

A month later, and another report on the same subject showing the same results, this time from the presumably non-human-rights-activist University of Washington, and we’re still not hearing from “pro-life” groups.

Goodness! You’d think “pro-life” was some kind of euphemism for “use pregnancy to punish any woman, married or not, for having sex.” Also known as “the wages of sin.”

I’ve mentioned this repeatedly in the past but unlike the euphemism “pro-life,” the pro-choice label is apt. The point of being pro-choice is to support women’s reproductive decision whether the decision is to become pregnant or avoid it, to terminate an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy or to carry a wanted pregnancy to term. (That’s why, for instance, Planned Parenthood is both the biggest provider of contraception services and pregnancy termination but also the biggest provider of prenatal care and post-partum care. That’s why, for instance pro-choice advocates oppose both efforts to limit access to birth control and abortion in the U.S., and opposed to force abortion in, say, China.)

This is why you’re hearing calls for reducing maternal mortality from pro-choice groups, and hearing diddly squat from “pro-life” organizations.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.

And, now that I’ve stumbled across her blog, it turns out that Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist is one of the few people I’ve ever met who talk about miscarriage as the (on average) everyday event it is.

Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working. Most miscarriages run their course over weeks. Even if you are someone who wanted the baby and are devastated by the loss, you’re not going to sit in bed for weeks. You are going to pick up your life and get back to it, which includes going back to work.

This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day. That we don’t acknowledge this is absurd. That it is such a common occurrence and no one thinks it’s okay to talk about is terrible for women.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s actually terrible for everybody.

It’s terrible for conversations about choice. Failing to discuss miscarriage, which is approximately as common as abortion, leaves the field of debate open and uncluttered for those who would proclaim themselves “pro-life.”

It’s terrible for couples who lose very-much planned and wanted pregnancies who, in the absence of virtually all conversation about it in advance, imagine their experience is commonplace rather than rare, and who consequently may blame themselves or each other rather than fate and odds.

It’s terrible for men because such silences increase the “mystery” and thus the alienation from their peers, colleagues, and fellow citizens.

And yeah, definitely, terrible for women for the way it helps perpetuate all the other silences that keep us from public understanding of everything that it is to be a human being.