This so called “war on women” is not just a war on cis women. It’s a war on anyone who needs access to safe, affordable, and accessible healthcare. If we want to make any real progress, we need to stop ignoring…
Source: ladyatheist
Three years ago today, I was 6 months pregnant sitting on the couch with the windows open. My husband was in the kitchen doing dishes from the brunch that we’d just finished eating. I had my laptop open on my lap, and said, “Holy shit,” as I reached for the TV remote.
“What?” my husband asked as he peered into the living room. “Fucking anti-choice zealots just fucking assassinated Tiller,” I said.
I spent the rest of the day yelling about violence against providers, and clinics, and methods of intimidation, and obsessively refreshing the news. CNN, Yahoo, AP… all of them. I wanted to know everything about what had happened. I thought about Barnett Slepian, who was assassinated by a sniper in his home in 1998. I shed tears.
I was angry. I’m STILL angry. Acts of violence against providers and facilities that perform abortion happen ALL.THE.TIME. They are acts of terrorism.
They are committed in an effort to stop a legal practice from a occurring. They are committed to remind doctors and clinic workers that they aren’t safe. They are committed in the hopes that they will do enough damage, or take enough lives that people will get sick of being harassed, hurt, and living in enough fear for their lives that they will pack up and go home.
It’s absolute bullshit.
What Drs. Tiller and Slepian did, what Dr. Carhart does, what Dr. Means is trying to do is heroic, and I’m grateful to them for their persistence.
Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.
— bell hooks (via sonofbaldwin)
(via laurenzuni)
Source: sonofbaldwin
I had an abortion.
I’m not going to tell you how old I was when I had it.
I’m not going to tell you what the circumstances around the pregnancy were.
I’m not going to tell you whether birth control was used or not.
I’m not going to tell you whether it was a wanted or an unwanted pregnancy.
I’m not going to tell you how far along the pregnancy was.
I’m not going to tell you whether there was a genetic abnormality, or whether my life was endangered by the pregnancy.
I’m not going to tell you any of those things because I think answering those questions, creating the situation from which my experience unfolds offers someone, everyone, anyone, the chance to say, “She deserved to access abortion,” or “How dare she get pregnant and have an abortion,” or find some pity in their heart for whatever piece of my situation offers them the opportunity to justify their judgment, or their sense of false safety.
When I was in high school (so many years ago) we had a speaker come to talk with us about HIV and AIDS. He told us about what living with AIDS was like. What it was like to defecate in his bed at 3am and be unable to move by himself and having to call for his parents to come clean him. To live with the stares that people gave him when they saw the sores on his arms. To be asked, over and over and over, “Well, how did you contract the disease?” He said it was a question he never answered. Because the answer would muddy his message with pity or feelings of false safety. How he contracted the disease was irrelevant to the fact that he had it.
This is how I feel about my abortion. None of the, “How did it happen?” matters. It’s irrelevant.
What matters is that I was able to access abortion when I needed to. When I wanted to. When I was pregnant and had the need to no longer be pregnant. When I was desperate to not be pregnant.
I walked past anti-choice protestors with their signs, and listened to their shouting, “Don’t do this! Think of your baby! We’re praying for you!” I pushed past them as they blocked the sidewalk.
The facility that did the abortion had, what I’ve come to understand is, an abortion doula. She held my hand, asked me if I was okay. If I needed anything. She tucked the stray hairs from my ponytail behind my ear and told me that everything was going to be all right.
When it was over, I threw up.
I have never regretted my abortion. For a long time I didn’t talk about it. In fact, I’m only just beginning to talk about it. I’ve always felt that my experience was just that, my experience and didn’t need to be shared. (I will admit, I did fear negative repercussion. I feared facing hostile judgement.) But I’m learning that things we don’t talk about – abortion, miscarriage…are things that we NEED to talk about. *I* need to pipe up when I hear someone struggling and say, “I’ve had this experience, too. This was how it went for me.”
Silence equals shame. And I am not ashamed.
This is beautiful. I’m pro-life for myself but that’s just for my body. Note how I said my body. Her body is her body and your body is your body. I don’t look down on people who have had or will have had abortions even though it isn’t a choice I would personally make. The only time I have a problem with it is when people use it as birth control because that’s just irresponsible.
Nobody has the right to choose what you want to do with your own body.
“The only time I have a problem with it is when people use it as birth control because that’s just irresponsible. “
This is EXACTLY the sentiment that my original post was in reaction to. It doesn’t matter to me why a person chooses to have an abortion - NO MATTER WHY A PERSON CHOOSES TO HAVE AN ABORTION - I WILL SUPPORT THEM.
I don’t care if it’s because they don’t want to be pregnant for their wedding, or their first day at work, or in the month of September.
I don’t think there is anything irresponsible about having an abortion when you have a need to no longer be pregnant.
I don’t care why abortion is accessed. I care only that it is able to be accessed, and safely.
Source: maehemsez
These dolls are just gorgeous. What a fantastic way to memorialize this experience. They bring a tear to my eye.
I’d like to describe Andrea Grimes and this post by using one of her favorite words: BALLER.
RH Reality Check set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.
In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?
We searched for providers within 30 miles of 78702, which turned up 137 doctors and clinics — initially, a very promising number. But once we weeded out the duplicates, we were left with just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When we called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, we were understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.
Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, told us they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.
The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising until we were told, repeatedly, that they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients—neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.
Ultimately, we were able to find nine providers within a 30-mile radius of our selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on under-served populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.
But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.
And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck we had in finding nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood.
[NB: More people than just cis women are affected by these draconian changes to the WHP.]
Now imagine trying to do the same thing RH Reality Check did while working full-time and caring for children.
Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus
I’m actually pretty numb to the “I wouldn’t have an abortion myself but I support the right to choose” argument. - Marianne at XOJane.com
— You NEVER know what you will do until you are faced with the situation and need to make a decision. You can theorize that you will never have an abortion, the same way you can theorize that you will never visit Europe. But until you find yourself pregnant, and each pregnancy comes with its own unique set of circumstances, you CANNOT KNOW what you will do. What decision you will be called upon to make. So, someday, you might find yourself having an abortion. And I will support you.
Source: xojane.com
Bold emphasis is mine.
Because when we cast abortion as a necessary evil, we really do perpetuate the shame of it. Someone, a lot of someones, is having all these abortions — but no one wants to talk about it because there is so much cultural fear and shame associated with it. It makes people — even and perhaps especially people who haven’t had an abortion — uncomfortable.
…
We need to spend more time talking about our abortions and less time having what is essentially the Tone Argument. In fact, I think that refusing to approach abortion as a terrible and serious thing actually does more to destigmatize it and open up the conversation than all the hushed tones in the world. That doesn’t mean the quiet and serious conversations need to go away — but it means we need some space and time to yell.
I am more convinced than I have ever been in my life, after my post I had an abortion, that we NEED to talk about it. The number of private messages I received from people telling me that they, too, had had abortions, but had never talked about it was astounding.
We NEED, I can’t stress enough how much of need this is, to lift the shame and silence from abortion. The anxiety that builds from keeping the damn silence is probably a hundred times worse than it would be if we were able to safely OWN OUR EXPERIENCES.
I will NEVER be the person in the room who DOESN’T speak up about my abortion again.
Source: xojane.com
Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve tried, for the most part, to stay relatively collected. I don’t like filling the pages with emotional outbursts; valid as I feel they are, they don’t feel productive.
I am angry now. I am angry that, no matter what arguments I make concerning a person’s right to their body, to their reproductive future, I am not heard. And I am angry that the writing distant from my emotions is not heard.
I am angry that the most reblogged posts I’ve written to date are a somewhat gimmicky poem and graphic descriptions of illegal abortions. I am angry that sensationalism seems to be the only way to reach the majority of people out there.
But to sway people to your side, you must use extremes, because they are the only way to make people think about the mundane, the everyday. To make people see reality, you have to shove it in their face, shake it around, and refuse to let go.
[I also don’t generally use trigger warnings, but I am warning you now that there are possible triggers in here regarding domestic violence and a graphic picture]
Gerri Santoro, born in 1935, was a 29-year-old mother of two, who grew up with 14 siblings on a farm in Connecticut. She married Sam Santoro at the age of 18 and gave birth to two daughters; the three of them spent the next 10 years enduring Sam’s verbal and physical abuse.
…I saw him abusing my nieces when they were just young children, four and five years old, and I mean giving them severe whippings, spanking. They were spankings, they were with a belt. Take his belt off and just whale the hell out of their fannies. You know, you say to yourself, jeez, what’s going on here and then you start putting two and two together and then you go back and you recollect the bruises on her face and on her arms and so forth and on her legs and you say to yourself, you say well jeez, these are not coincidences. There’s something wrong there.
Gerri took her daughters and left Sam in 1963, returning to her childhood home. She began going to school, where she met another man, Clyde Dixon. The two of them began a relationship, and soon, Gerri was pregnant.
Gerri was more than six months along when her estranged husband contacted her again. He was coming to her home to see his daughters, and to try and reconcile with her. Gerri panicked, fearing for her life and her daughters.
[A]ugust, that’s when Sam was coming in. No wonder she had to have the abortion cause of Sam coming, that’s about when the baby was due. She knew better. She knew it would kill you, she knew. But she was desperate. Sam would have taken the girls. I mean, back in those days, she would have never saw them again. But that’s how desperate she was. Because Sam was coming back in August.
Gerri and Clyde checked into a motel on June 8, 1964. Clyde had borrowed a medical textbook and instruments from a work colleague.
Clyde was not a doctor. Gerri began to hemorrhage. Clyde fled, leaving her to bleed to death, alone in the motel room.
I would feel better to think it was sudden and that she didn’t have to lay there and be alone. But I don’t believe that’s what happened.
I believe she had some time to think. Because the way the rags were in her hands, you know what I mean, this was a woman who wasn’t just sitting about and suddenly collapsed.
This was a woman who was in the throes of dying and was doing what she could to stop bleeding and stop, you know. From that picture, that’s what it looks like.
Ms. Magazine published the photo of Gerri in 1973.
This woman was the victim of a criminal abortion. Her body was photographed exactly as it was found by police in a blood and barren motel room. This individual woman has come to represent the thousands of women who have been maimed or murdered by a society that denied them safe and legal abortions.
Joannie Santoro-Griffin, Gerri’s daughter, had this to say:
Now, it’s still every bit as tragic of a picture and it’s still pretty rotten that my mom has to be exposed to the public eye that way but, that’s for her sake. ’ Cause I would want people to still remember her as beautiful. I wouldn’t want anybody to have an ugly image of her. And you look at some woman lying there dead and those who are against abortion think of her as some scum and she was not. She was a beautiful, beautiful woman and that can happen to anyone.
THIS is what Bubba Carpenter and his ilk are proud of.
Source: bebinn
I see a lot of “slavery is over, black people should move on” rhetoric on the internet. And mostly I roll my eyes & keep it moving. But I notice that people who say these things lack historical knowledge. They don’t know about the Red Summer in which race riots broke out in 36 cities. The…
Source: karnythia
