reproductive choice

The Panel of "Experts" Called by Darryl Issa to Testify About "Religious Freedom" to Deny Birth Control to Women

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2012-02-16 10:26

Photo via DailyKos. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo via DailyKos.

C'mon! They're not even trying any more!

I sometimes chaff at Amanda Marcotte's assertion that men just want to hurt women. Or even that men have an "I poke it I own it" attitude. And since, in fact, most men actually don't want either to hurt or own women, it's a bit offensive that fucking choad-wads like Issa assemble panels of Y-chromosome dil-dopes all selected based on their opinion that, no, in fact, law of the land should be that if they ever manage to poke it they deserve to own it.

Remember, we're not even talking about abortion here. We're just talking about plain old birth control! Sweet mother of pearl!

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For those of you playing religious assessment at home check out the official King James rule book.

  • Matthew 23:13 "But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
  • Matthew 23:4 "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on [wo]men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers"
  • Matthew 23:15 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."
  • Matthew 23:23 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

Point being that, yeah, there's a strong sense among people of faith that religion is under assault in America. And so it is. But the assault comes from within. Opposition from without is driven far more by alienation than antipathy.


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Amanda Marcotte on the False Equvalence Between What Everyone Believes and "What Everyone Believes"

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2011-11-09 11:33

Amanda Marcotte on the pro-choice "Mississippi miracle"... and the power of the secret ballot.

It's not something I've ever seen an extensive study on, but the folk wisdom of pro-choice circles is "pro-life in the streets, pro-choice in the dark", as it were. In other words, there's an intense amount of pressure to identify as "pro-life" in conservative communities, even if you secretly disagree. To be vocally pro-choice is to be marked as a pervert and a feminist, and so it's avoided, to the point where some polling data suggests that half of people who identify as "pro-life" are actually pro-choice, at least to some extent. Certainly enough that they're not willing to see women thrown in jail for having miscarriages. Because of this intense social pressure, I suspect many people who side with pro-choicers on this law or that law won't say so to a pollster over the phone. Not only are you admitting out loud something that can get you marked as a "pervert" in your community, you may be doing so in front of friends, colleagues, or family members who overhear your conversation with the pollster. No wonder so many people say they're "undecided". But when you actually have your ballot in hand and you know that no one will ever find out how you voted, a solid percentage of voters go with common sense (and with sex!) instead of prevailing community pressures. Frankly, the way the poll numbers turned out, it appears many people who said they would vote yes on 26 instead voted no.

Source: Pandagon

That sounds about right.

I think I'm coming down with another cold, or at least I'm feeling a little muzzy-headed. So I can't remember the sociology term I'm reaching for. But it seems to me like this is another one of those cases where public sentiment is dominated by the desire of a majority not to be outed as "the only one who feels that way." When, in fact, the majority really doesn't feel that way. And where, in fact, the kind of understandable desire not to be outed when it seems like "everybody else" feels that way is kind of strong. And where, I suspect, the urgent desire not to be outed leads to sometimes increasingly zealous efforts to go the other way. Thus you have people like J. Edgar Hoover or Rev. Haggard leading the charge against homosexuality. Or people like Herman Cain or Dan Quayle spouting sometimes ridiculous affirmations about no-exceptions anti-abortion policy while totally considering it a free choice for their own family members.

I think it's a big problem with so-called "conscience clauses" for healthcare providers, the ones that allow, say, pharmacists to refuse to stock emergency contraception due to their (nominally!) "private" objections. When, in fact, they may personally only be succumbing to public expectations in their communities... expectations set, as Amanda suggests, by a majority in the community who... themselves don't think it's a problem but definitely don't want to be seen as "the only ones who feels that way."

Update: I didn't read far enough before posting this, but Amanda draws the same conclusion in her post.

When they say things like, "the only way to prevent STDs is for two virgins to marry and stay faithful" or "contraception thwarts God's intentions for human sexuality", they face a chorus of amens from people who then often turn around and demonstrate, with their behavior, that they simply don't agree.

Again, that sounds right.


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No, Seriously, 1,000 Bills Say Nothing Is More Important to 'Wingers Than Limiting Women's Reproductive Choice

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-05-05 10:13

Speaking of the Republican's murderously extremist anti-choice provisions in H.B.3, Amanda Marcotte adds that effectively passing the Two Rules of Desire into law isn't just a fluke but instead effectively the core social policy of the contemporary Republican Party.

If you think I'm exaggerating, consider the sheer amount of attention and legislation Republicans are giving towards this task of making sure women pay for having sex. Nearly 1,000 anti-choice bills in state legislatures, a state-by-state attempt to defund Planned Parenthood after nearly shutting the federal government down to do it, and of course the radical expansion of federal powers in an attempt to keep women from spending private money on abortions that passed the House yesterday.  This is clearly issue #1, neatly disproving the skepticism I often meet from liberal men that conservatives really care that much about rolling back women's rights.

Source: Pandagon

I mean... nearly 1,000 bills! There haven't even been that many bills to bust unions.  There haven't been nearly that many bills to cut taxes.  There haven't been that many bills to fuck over immigrants.  There haven't been that many bills to gut environmental protection, consumer protection, bank regulations, to force prayer in schools, to outlaw teaching evolution, nor any other nominally "conservative" agenda item.  Hell, there haven't been that many bills increasing penalties for "false rape reporting" and you know those motherfuckers are all about empowering rapists.  In other words there really, literally, isn't anything more important to the Republican Party than shutting down women's ability to make reproductive choices.

And it's no mystery why: to permit woman to make reproductive choices would be to acknowledge that women might ever consent to, let alone desire, sex for its own sake.  And they find that notion both inconceivable and intolerable enough that they'd literally rather see women die first.


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The Two Rules of Desire and House Bill Three ("To Prohibit Taxpayer Funded Abortions and to Provide for Conscience Protections")

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-05-05 09:38

Amanda Marcotte lays out the "Right to Life" community's attitude towards women who violate the bogus Two Rules of Desire in black and white as expressed in the "Conscience Protection" provisions of the recently passed H.R.3.

HR3 had bundled in it the assumption that women who have sex forsake their right to life, because of the amendment that allows anti-choice hospitals to refuse to save a pregnant woman's life if doing so would kill the fetus.  The only possible reason they can imagine for keeping a pregnant woman alive is to make sure she has the baby---if you're not going to have a baby, you might as well die, too.  When you had sex, any value you had as a human being in your own right evaporated, and your only role now is a baby carrier.

Source: Pandagon

In their mindset an entirely non-erotic desire for pregnancy is the only conceivable and indeed the only tolerable reason a woman may ever consent to sex. A woman who seeks emergency contraception or an abortion after sex, or one who wants contraception before sex, is by-definition not interested in becoming pregnant. And that, my dears, is both inconceivable and intolerable. They'd literally rather see women dead.

It's worth noting that their assumptions about women and sexual desire helps explain why they're so committed to "helping" women have their rapist's babies: as far as they're concerned sex for women is always against their will, so for them having a rapist's baby should be absolutely the same to a woman as having her husband's. I mean, yes, yes, the the woman's father or husband and his family might have problems with the genealogy of the resulting baby, but any pregnancy being a pregnancy, inside their mindset that shouldn't worry the woman's pretty little head in the least.


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Two Million Stillbirths Worth Only Two and a Half Lines to "Pro-Life" Bloggers

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-04-21 04:25

So a bunch of clowns at something called "ProLifeBlogs" gives a whole two and a half lines, plus a link to another website, for a new report about stillbirth.

More than 2 million babies are stillborn every year worldwide and about half could be saved if their mothers had better medical care, according to research estimates published Thursday in the medical journal Lancet. ...

Source: "ProLifeBlogs"

Two and a half lines? Is this the best a "pro-life" organization can do?

Their blog's search feature turns up exactly four other posts about stillbirth, only a handful about miscarriage, none more recent than 2007. None are actually relevant to the millions of unanswered stillbirths every year, the tens of millions more unanswered miscarriages and spontaneous abortions, and... just all kinds of stuff about how "pro-life" those folks imagine they are.

There's only one way to measure whether someone's interest is authentically "pro-life" or if instead they just want to control women: what they do about stillbirth, miscarriage, and spontaneous abortion. If they don't do anything about it, but still call themselves "pro-life" they're liars.

You know why the pro-choice movement calls itself "pro-choice?" Do you know why it fights against forced abortion in places like China even as it fights for the right to choose to terminate an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy in the United States? Because it's not about forced pregnancy, and it's not about forced abortion (and it's sure as heck not about the "sanctity" of forced sex!) Instead it's about *choice!*

A stillbirth stops a *wanted* beating heart. A miscarriage almost always stops a wanted beating heart too. Miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, and stillbirth are almost as prevalent worldwide as induced abortion and yet "pro-life" organizations do, what? Nothing!

You know that old quip about the pro-life movement? "Caring about children from conception to birth but not a minute after?" That's not even true is it? Because they're doing exactly what? Sure, they're willing to gun down a doctor in his church or kitchen, willing to waive banners, splash blood, "ex-communicate" honest legislators, put out vaguely racist ads, to celebrate this imposition on a clinic, that imposition on women, the other "tough minded" choice to extend a rape victims nightmare from minutes to nine months.

But a minute later they're willing to... waive bye-bye to two million stillborn babies a year with a flipping two and a half line post?  Yeah, that's "pro-life" alright.

You know what will happen to the "pro-life" movement when the Supreme Court overturns Roe V. Wade? Every last one of them (those who don't turn their attention to outlawing condoms) will pack up their bags, say "that'll teach those hoors and floozies" and never again trouble their little brains with another thought about "unborn life."

Meanwhile? Two million unanswered stillbirths will still happen every year. Between tens and hundreds of millions of unanswered miscarriages and spontaneous abortions a year will still happen every year. Every one of them an "unborn life" that not a one of them ever has, or ever will care about.

Because really? If they did care then someone, somewhere in the "pro-life" movement would have already stepped up their game.

If you follow the link in that casually tossed-off post you know who it turns out helped fund that Lancet Stillbirth study? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You know who were still pro choice last time I looked? Bill and Melinda Gates. You know why they're putting time and money into this instead of a "pro-life" organization? Because unlike "pro-life" agitators they aren't just into this to punish women. They're not into this "pro-life" business to use fetuses to smack women back into line. Unlike some people. They're into it because they believe that if you make the choice to have a baby, as most people actually do, then we should all do everything we can to support that choice. Just as we should support every reproductive choice.

Instead of la-dee-daing two million stillbirths into oblivion with a miserly two and a half lines. No surprise though. That's is about what one ever expects from a bunch of lazy, immoral, unethical, inconsiderate, and hateful liars.

Update: My mistake!  A bit more research suggests that "pro-life" organizations have been agitating to... send "birth" certificates to grieving parents after stillbirth.  Because, after a hard day of defunding prenatal-care providers and imposing capricious restrictions on women's healthcare decisions what else could one possibly do about stillbirth?


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On Grown-Up Words Like "Incorporate" and "Uterus"

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2011-04-11 00:06

Amanda Marcotte, in rare form on the recent brouhaha over the American Taliban's effort in the Florida state legislature to censor censure censor a fellow legislator for using the word "uterus" around children. As in the sentence "If my wife incorporated her uterus, you all would say hands off."

[P]eople who can’t tolerate hearing the syllables you-ter-us spoken aloud should not be filing 18 separate bills aimed at snatching control of the organs away from the rightful owners. If you want to control something that badly, you should be able to say it out loud.

Source: RHRealityCheck.org

This quip more than any other illuminates the wicked-childishness of the anti-choice mind set.

She notes that the children present were high-school age legislative pages, and ponders the (trust me, absolutely real) conservative belief "that a girl of 15, 16 or 17 is too young to hear the word “uterus,” but she’s plenty old enough to be forced to bear a child against her will." But I digress.

I'd just like to point out that this tidbit from, the Washington Independent (via Barbara Morill)

The ACLU of Florida. The ACLU has just launched a website at which women can incorporate their uteri online, thus sending a message to Florida legislators that “less regulation and government intrusion begins with a woman’s uterus.” The website calls on women to literally make their uterus their own business.

Source: Washington Independent

Here's the official ACLU Incorporate My Uterus website.

My feeling is that it's a good idea to keep pushing conservative's operatic tropes into opposition: the "sanctity" of business vs. the "sanctity" of life, the "sanctity" of pollution and pesticides vs. the "sanctity" of life, etc.  It won't affect the true believers, sure, but not everyone who pulls the lever for those guys is a true believer.


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Remembering When Abortion and Contraception Were Illegal: Clarisse Thorn Hosts Two Short Films in Chicago's Hull House Tonight

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2011-03-08 08:14

Tonight in Chicago Clarisse Thorn will be hosting two short films about the days before Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade established the rights, respectively, to contraception and abortion without prosecution.

Tuesday the 8th, my sex-positive film series in Chicago will be screening two films about feminist icons and feminist history. Here’s the event description:

Many laws, policies and social mores have tried to restrict women’s ability to take ownership of our bodies. To kick off the new ACTIVIST SEX and SEXUAL HISTORY themes of SEX+++, we’re going to show two documentaries about amazing feminists who fought for our right to make our own choices!

  • “Jane: An Abortion Service” is a fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women’s history. It tells the story of “Jane," the Chicago-based women’s health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training. As Jane members describe finding feminism and clients describe finding Jane, archival footage and recreations mingle to depict how the repression of the early sixties and social movements of the late sixties influenced this unique group.
  • “Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance” highlights this pioneer’s strategies of using media and popular culture to advance the cause of birth control. It tells the story of her arrest and trial, using actuality films, vaudeville, courtroom sketches and re-enactments, video effects and Sanger’s own words.

SEX+++
pro-SEX, pro-QUEER, pro-KINK
a free documentary film series for people who like sex

Second Tuesdays, 7pm
FREE, all are welcome
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
800 S Halsted
RSVP: (312) 413-5353
Here’s Facebook, here’s the Google Group email list

Source: Feministe

I'll be there. I'm old enough to have been a high-school-age peer counselor in the days before Roe, and at least technically old enough to remember Griswold. But it was all pretty vague to me. So I'm looking forward to the refresher.


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Simplified Access to Contraception Cuts Abortion Rates in Half So Anti-Choicers Want to, What Else, Eliminate It

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2011-02-28 12:41

Sungold has what might help explain the right's otherwise inexplicable* intolerance of contraception.

Here’s an item from the annals of “no shit, Sherlock!” science: A UCSF study shows a stunning decrease in unintended pregnancy and abortion when women are dispensed a year’s supply of birth control pills at once. What’s stunning is not the basic trend line, but the magnitude of the study’s findings. Science Daily recaps it:

"Researchers observed a 30 percent reduction in the odds of pregnancy and a 46 percent decrease in the odds of an abortion in women given a one-year supply of birth control pills at a clinic versus women who received the standard prescriptions for one — or three-month supplies."

Can I rephrase those numbers? Pregnancy declined by nearly a third, and abortion by nearly half!

Source: Kittywampus

More contraception means fewer abortions.  Since at least the 1980s hard-core anti-abortion activists have worried (correctly in my view) that there's an abortion rate threshhold below which the "squishy middle" will lose interest.  Since the hard-core's goal is absolute elimination of abortion (or at least abortion rights), again at least in the 1980s, they made a strategic decision to oppose any and all initiatives that only reduce abortion rates.

Consequently contraception is to an anti-choicer as garlic is to a vampire: a horror to be avoided and eliminated at all cost.

Cutting abortion demand by half is the last thing those assholes want.

See also

*Until maybe the middle 1970s there were on balance probably more highly-placed Republican supporters of birth control than Democratic ones it seems particularly hard to understand.  In 1947 George W. Bush's not particularly liberal grandfather Prescott Bush was nevertheless the first nationwide capital fundraiser for Planned Parenthood!  This connection probably cost him a Senate seat in Connecticut when Democrats teamed up with Catholic churches to oppose his election.  He lost by only 1,000 votes, but he still lost.  Nor was the Bush family unusual.


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Searched for Origin of "Coerced Paternity After Oral Sex" Story, Found Sherry Colb's Interesting FindLaw Blog Instead

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2011-02-24 19:03

So about a week ago Amanda Hess mentioned a peculiar paternity case that's making the rounds of the blogosphere lately... even though the case in question was decided back in 2005.

The saga of Dr. Richard Phillips and Dr. Sharon Irons continues: "Phillips accuses Dr. Sharon Irons of a 'calculated, profound personal betrayal' after their affair six years ago, saying she secretly kept semen after they had oral sex, then used it to get pregnant," the Associated Press reports. After toiling in Chicago courts for years, "An appeals court said [Phillips] can press a claim for emotional distress after learning a former lover had used his sperm to have a baby. But he can’t claim theft, the ruling said, because the sperm were hers to keep." Irons, who has established Phillips' paternity of the child, claims that she and Phillips had sexual intercourse on multiple occasions during their relationship..

Source: TBD

As I usually do when stories that resemble "evergreen" memes crop up I started looking for any other references to either of the two doctors and... pretty much couldn't find anything that wasn't related to the 2005 appeals court ruling.  Nothing about the initial ruling, nothing about other allegations, nothing about the child who'd now be a 10 or 11 year old, and definitely nothing about whether Dr. Phillips might have come to appreciate having a child even if (as he alleges but she disputes) Dr. Irons conceived the child in a very deplorable manner.  (I'd be bloody horrified to learn I had a child I didn't know about because I really, really enjoy being a father and it would totally gut me to miss out on the first two years of one of my children's lives, even if the mom was a total dick.)

Anyway, the only serious non-knee-jerk discussion of the case I found was this pretty cool and even-handed consideration of the case and its circumstances by Cornell Prof Sherry Colb at FindLaw, again, back in 2005: When Oral Sex Results in a Pregnancy: Can Men Ever Escape Paternity Obligations.

On the one hand, she says, the law is and has been since roughly the Code of Hammurabi that "when a baby comes into the world, both the man and the woman whose genes led up to the child's existence are ordinarily responsible for the care of that baby, regardless of whether the child was 'wanted' by both parents."  On the other hand "even if one accepts that intercourse equals consent to paternity, what happens when a man does not consent to intercourse? Does he still bear the risk of becoming a father? The case of Phillips and Irons ... tests our intuitions about that very question."

While Colb clearly accepts Phillips's claims for the sake of the argument she does nicely construct hypothetical cases where a man unambiguously (and, significantly, non-sexually) could become a biological partner.  And asks, correctly, why would a victim be held responsible for the care of a child he literally had only an absconded-with biological connection to.  (Colb doesn't mention it but see also the extreme-outlier statutory-rape/paternity mix-up case I mentioned a few posts ago.)

You need to read her post for the details, the upshot of which makes you realize that not only are there no easy questions, there are no easy answers either.  But in the end Colb comes down, narrowly and tentatively on the side of not holding a biological parent legally, economically, or physically responsible who literally has no responsibility for the creation of his child.

To which I would just add, implies, strongly, that the same must be true of holding legally or economically responsible a biological parent who equally literally has no responsibility for the creation of her child.  An item which, if Colb's opinion were made law, would offer an entirely non-"privacy penundrum" foundation for quite a bit of law regarding reproductive choice.  Egregious "no exception for rape" clauses being only the most obvious.

And finally, no, I never did find out anything else about that now-old appeals court case except a few terse newswire accounts and a lot of angry people's speculations and opinions thereof.  (Even Colb's post, while informed in terms of the law, is speculative in terms of the actual case.)  Nor is there any reason why such an old story would find itself revived.

Still, I'm glad it did.  Turns out Colb has written a ton of articles on legal issues near and dear to most of our hearts.  She doesn't always come down on my general side of issues but she usually does.  At this rate I'll be up all night reading pretty interesting treatments of gender, rape, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, etc, from her FindLaw blog.


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What Are You Going to Do to Protect Affordable Care Act Contraceptive Coverage From Wingnut Attacks?

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-07-13 10:12

Matthew Yglesias comments on the good news about contraceptive access provisions in the Affordable Care act and the possible bad news in Dana Goldstein’s report that anti-choice activists are gearing up to keep those provisions from taking effect.

Politically speaking, I think this is the fight progressives have been wanting to have for some time now—something that would highlight the deeply reactionary and anti-woman ideology that drives the main institutional players in the anti-abortion movement. But will it be possible to get people to pay attention? These non-abortion reproductive health aspects of the Affordable Care Act got very little attention from either side.

He said it here.

That it wasn’t well-known is probably good news overall. Had it been then the anti’s noise machine could have put the brakes on it. Instead they were content to rattle on about other sticks-to-the-wall shit they were throwing.

But if it’s unknown there’s now a risk that the ‘wingers could get their hooks in it first, leaving progressives to play catch up yet again, still, as always.

So much the better then that Goldstein’s raised the concern and that Monica Potts, and Yglesias, Lindsay Beyerstein, Kevin Drum, and me, and (hint, hint) you and (HINT! HINT! HINT!) major-fundraising national-powerhouse feminist and progressive institutions start working the issue first.


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