Prolonged Eye Contact

Not that we needed further proof radscum are racist and stuck in the 60’s…

lucypaw:

prolongedeyecontact:

[TW for discussion of forced sterilization and racism]

So someone on Feministing (I think) finally made the connection that trans* rights and reproductive rights/abortion are both fundamentally about bodily integrity and autonomy and therefore have many intersections, and proponents of both should be working together (something I’ve been saying since day one, along with many other trans* people before me).

Well radical feminists aren’t having it. Apparently the fact eludes them that forced sterilization and forced birth are two sides of the same antichoice coin. Which brings me to my main point. This so-called “conflict of interest” has happened before (maybe more than once?). During the second wave the interests and reproductive rights of wealthy, white feminists and WoC were going in opposite directions. White women were demanding access to abortion and to voluntary sterilization without restrictions from paternalistic doctors and simultaneously WoC were struggling to: be allowed to have children, not be demonized for having children, not be forcibly sterilized (often without their knowledge or consent), and not be tested on for development of contraception or other medications. Guess who was prioritized. Exactly. There’s a history here and a lot of tension and mistrust (rightfully) still remains because rich, white women made “reproductive rights” synonymous with what they needed access to and completely avoided the fact that the right to have children is as much of a reproductive rights issue as the right to abort/not have children.

My point is we know these radical feminists hate intersectionality because they think sex-based oppression is the only thing that matters (this is racist all on its own) and we know they hate trans* people. The fact that they don’t see how important forced sterilization is now anymore than they did back then has some serious implications considering the intersection of race and trans* status. Forced sterilization affects us all but TWoC are disproportionately the victims of violence and often have an even more precarious and tenuous relationship to the medical establishment, opening them up to all kinds of violations, particularly in regards to reproductive rights. That once again forced sterilization isn’t a priority for radical feminists and reproductive rights activists is further proof of their racism and the fact that White Feminism™ is alive and well, in case you doubted it for a split second.

I would point out it’s not just radscum.  Sure, radscum are the most obvious and most extreme but mainstream/liberal feminism still doesn’t really give a shit about reproductive rights as anything but abortion and voluntary sterilisation.  Oh, wait, I take it back, they will sometimes mention fistulas and women in the developing countries but it’s still self-centred and paternalistic to other people.  White Feminism™ lives in the mainstream as well as the backwater sludge that is the radscum.

Oh, definitely, definitely! I was just a little hyper-focused on them because this was a direct response to some stuff I saw on radical feminist blogs, but you’re absolutely right and I do usually go after mainstream/liberal feminists just as hard on this issue as well. They’re certainly not much better.

I SEE YOU

shl333:

Politicians who began and instigated the “War on Drugs” which effectively put thousands of people of color behind bars, I SEE YOU.

Politicians who pass voter reform laws making it harder for those of lower socio-economic class to vote, also know as people of color, I SEE YOU

Lobbyists, politicians, and political advocacy groups who seek to limit those with uteruses access to contraception, I SEE YOU

Lobbyists and politicians and political advocacy groups who seek to limit gay, lesbian, trans*, and queer rights to marriage, adoption, insurance, to visit their dying partners in hospital rooms, to quality of life, to safety, I SEE YOU

Politicians, lobbyists, and political advocacy groups who seek to limit those with uteruses rights to abortion and even make their efforts to make reproductive choices a criminal act, I SEE YOU

Media executives and corporate heads who continue to refuse to give meaningful story lines or roles to people of color, women, gay, lesbian, trans*, and queer individuals, I SEE YOU

Media executives, advertisers, and corporate heads who continue to exploit people of color, women, gay, lesbian, trans*, and queer individuals to sell products, make jokes, and ultimately invalidate their human experiences, I SEE YOU

Media executives, advertisers, and corporate heads who continue to encourage an environment of shame against those who do not fit your societal standards of beauty such as trans*, queer, fat, gender bending individuals and people of color in order to sell products to them that they don’t need, I SEE YOU

The judicial system who refuses to prosecute, reprimand, or even criticize the behavior of members of the police force when it comes to issues of police brutality, racial profiling, and violation of civil rights, I SEE YOU

The police force that continues to brutalize, profile, and murder people of color daily, I SEE YOU

Those of you walking around everyday making jokes at the expense of sexual assault victims, people of color, women, trans*, gay, lesbian, and queer individuals, I SEE YOU

Those of you clutching your bags as a black man walks by, staring at a queer couple holding hands in the mall, asking objectifying and insulting questions about the validity of trans* peoples sex and gender, shaking your head at the girl buying plan B in front of you in the grocery store, I SEE YOU

YOU ARE NOT HIDING.
YOU ARE NOT FOOLING US.
WE WILL NOT GIVE IN. WE WILL NOT GIVE UP. WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN. 

#TRUTH

Any requests?

I’m making a static page of facts and statistics for the blog so they’ll be easily accessible both to me and my followers. So far I’m addressing: 

Planned Parenthood’s services and countering antichoice myths about them, birth control costs, abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work, the truth behind the contraception mandate and the Affordable Care Act, unintended pregnancy, safety of legal versus illegal abortion, safety of pregnancy/maternal mortality rate, the truth behind: Live Action/Lila Rose/Abby Johnson/Priscilla Coleman/The Silent Scream/David Reardon/Obama and “infanticide”, reasons for getting abortions, who gets abortions, other important demographic data about abortion, abortion procedures (both legal and illegal), state restrictions and laws, court cases in regards to reproductive rights, reproductive rights and human rights, incidence of abortion and other trends, number of abortion providers, antichoice terrorism and violence, PASS, abortion and breast cancer, the effects of antichoice protesters on abortion patients, the adoption and foster care systems, embryonic and fetal development, fetal pain/consciousness/”brain waves”, fetal homicide laws/UVVA, reproductive coercion and birth control sabotage, Margaret Sanger, “black genocide” theories and why they’re racist, CPCs and deception, studies about viewing ultrasounds and products of conception and how they don’t change minds, the history of abortion, abortion in animals/nature, where to find reputable information for research/legislation/fact checking.

Is there anything else people want to know about? Any myths or antichoice memes you want addressed? Anything you need facts about?

A message on critical thinking for “Pro-lifers”

ghost-plot:

I just saw the quote from Margaret Sanger about how she said the most merciful thing a (large) family can do is to kill the an infant again. You can’t use this as an argument.

Here’s a lesson on why: Your Pope was a Hitler Youth. Your Pope was deeply involved in an organization that rounded up millions of people based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disabilities, and anything else they didn’t like with the sole purpose of killing them.

Now stop for a second. What are you about to say? What are you thinking? Are you thinking, “But that was years ago!” or, “He didn’t have a choice!” Because you’re right. It was years ago and he didn’t have a choice.

So you acknowledge the fact that context is important. Why isn’t it important for Margaret Sanger? You acknowledge that choice is important for the Pope, why isn’t it important for women today? You’re thinking that we can’t use a person’s past against them, the same is true for Margaret Sanger (and Planned Parenthood.)

Margaret anger said that in the 20;s, about large miner families where many of the children died painful and slow deaths before their first birthday. Context is alwaysimportant, don’t pretend it’s not.

Stop lying. Stop manipulating. And stop thinking that people are too stupid to find out some facts, because they’re not.

Yeah, this always rubs me the wrong way. 1) it’s the genetic fallacy and 2) Sanger was a product of her time and no one on our side is trying to claim she was something she wasn’t. She said plenty of really blatantly bad things, so why take other things out of context that actually aren’t that wrong? It makes you look underhanded. Like the merciful quote. How many of you antichoicers have actually read the quote in context and know what she was actually saying?

From a past post: [cis-centric]

She was being facetious not prescriptive. How about you actually look at the original source in context before talking about something you know nothing about? Was Margaret Sanger perfect? Hardly. She did and said a lot of things which were and still are unacceptable. But she was also a product of her time. Even people we like and hold in high esteem, such as Gandhi, have held racist attitudes. Further, if you bothered to read this chapter from her book you’d know she was talking about how in the early 1900s excessively large families increased the morality rate for subsequent children, by quite a bit actually. This was due to a lack of resources and/or the health toll on the woman of enduring multiple pregnancies which, of course, affects the health of the newborn. This is far from a heartless passage in the book. In fact she’s expressing worry and horror about what impoverished women and their families were facing during that time period.

[…]

The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering their children, incapable of enjoying life.

“Every physician,” writes Dr. Wm. J. Robinson in Birth Control or The Limitation of Offspring,” knows that too frequent childbirth, nursing and the sleepless nights that are required in bringing up a child exhaust the vitality of thousands of mothers, make them prematurely old, or turn them into chronic invalids.”

[…]

If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting from poverty, or, to excessive childbearing by the mother.

The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner’s family and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by a number of studies of the infant death-rate. One of the clearest of these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr. Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress. ² Taking 26,000 births from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two children, Geissler got this result:

[chart from link goes here but won’t format on tumblr]

Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the, sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.

[…]

(Sanger, Women and the New Race, 1920).

A fact sheet from Planned Parenthood that explains many of her quotes which are often taken out of context can be found HERE. [The quote in question is on page 4].

And another fact sheet that gives some background and context on her and her work can be found HERE.

OVER HALF OF WOMEN OF REPRODUCTIVE AGE LIVE IN ABORTION-HOSTILE STATES | Over half of U.S. women who are biologically able to get pregnant live in states that would be hostile to a woman seeking an abortion, according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute. Twelve years ago, that statistic was only 31 percent. Women are not moving en masse; due to the slew of new abortion restriction laws in states across the country, they are just suddenly finding themselves in hostile territory.

Also from ThinkProgress: INTERACTIVE MAP: The Most Restrictive Abortion Measures In The States

_____________________________________________________

*People capable of getting pregnant, not just cis women.

From the Guttmacher study mentioned by ThinkProgress:

…

This article assesses how and where the volume of abortion restrictions has changed over the last decade. To do so, we analyzed whether—in 2000, 2005 and 2011—states had in place at least one provision in any of 10 categories of major abortion restrictions.* The identified categories include

• mandated parental involvement prior to a minor’s abortion;

• required preabortion counseling that is medically inaccurate or misleading;

• extended waiting period paired with a requirement that counseling be conducted in-person, thus necessitating two trips to the facility;

• mandated performance of a non–medically indicated ultrasound prior to an abortion;

• prohibition of Medicaid funding except in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest;

• restriction of abortion coverage in private health insurance plans;

• medically inappropriate restrictions on the provision of medication abortion;

• onerous requirements on abortion facilities that are not related to patient safety;

• unconstitutional ban on abortions prior to fetal viability or limitations on the circumstances under which an abortion can be performed after viability; or

• preemptive ban on abortion outright in the event Roe v. Wade is overturned†

…

For purposes of this analysis, we consider a state “supportive” of abortion rights if it had enacted provisions in no more than one of these restriction categories, “middle-ground” if it had enacted provisions in two or three categories and “hostile” if it had enacted provisions in four or more.

Overall, most states—35 in total—remained in the same category in all three years (see map); however, of the 15 states that moved from one category to another, every one became more restrictive over the period. Two of the states supportive of abortion rights in 2000 moved to the middle category by 2011, and one had become hostile. Moreover, 12 states that had been middle-ground in 2000 had become hostile to abortion rights by 2011.

As a result, the number of both supportive and middle-ground states shrank considerably, while the number of hostile states ballooned. In 2000, 19 states were middle-ground and only 13 were hostile. By 2011, when states enacted a record-breaking number of new abortion restrictions (see box), that picture had shifted dramatically: 26 states were hostile to abortion rights, and the number of middle-ground states had cut in half, to nine.

…

2011: A Year for the Record Books

Over the course of 2011, legislators in all 50 states introduced more than 1,100 provisions related to reproductive health and rights. At the end of it all, states had adopted 135 new reproductive health provisions—a dramatic increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.¹ Fully 92 of the enacted provisions seek to restrict abortion, shattering the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005 (see chart). A striking 68% of the reproductive health provisions from 2011 are abortion restrictions, compared with only 26% the year before.

…

Although states on the West Coast and in the Northeast remained consistently supportive of abortion rights, the situation was very different elsewhere. A cluster of states in the middle of the country—including Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota—moved from being middle-ground states in 2000 to being hostile in 2011. And of the 13 states in the South, only half were hostile in 2000, but all had become hostile by 2011.

Over a third of women of reproductive age lived in states supportive of abortion rights in both 2000 and 2011, 40% and 35%, respectively (see chart, page 18).² However, the proportion of women living in states hostile to abortion rights increased dramatically, from 31% to 55%, while the proportion living in middle-ground states shrank, from 29% to 10%. Altogether, the number of women of reproductive age living in hostile states grew by 15 million over the period, while the number in middle-ground states fell by almost 12 million.

…

REFERENCES

1. Guttmacher Institute, Laws affecting reproductive health and rights: 2011 state policy review, 2012, <http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/updates/2011/statetrends42011.html>, accessed Feb. 22, 2012.

2. Guttmacher Institute, unpublished tabulations of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

---

*Restrictions included for 2000 and 2005 were all in effect. Some restrictions enacted in 2011 are still being litigated.

†The 19 individual restrictions include: mandating parental involvement (consent or notification); requiring misleading counseling (informing a woman that the fetus is a person, that a fetus can feel pain, that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer or that abortion can impair future fertility); requiring a woman to make two trips to an abortion facility; requiring ultrasound; limiting Medicaid funding for abortion; restricting private insurance coverage (in all private plans, plans sold on exchanges or plans for public employees); limiting medication abortion (telemedicine bans or requiring the use of an outdated protocol); instituting onerous requirements for abortion providers (medically unnecessary physical plant requirements or mandating that physicians have hospital admitting privileges); restricting later abortion (gestational limits or unconstitutional limits on later abortion); and banning abortion immediately if Roe is overturned.

This is downright vile. That set of three maps depicting the shrinking of supportive states really pulls the dire condition of reproductive rights into sharp focus. We’ve had some minor victories but the country as a whole is being pulled from a moderate middle to the extremist right by people that have no interest in human rights, science, or honesty. Time and again legislation is being passed due to the GOP’s ability to muddle the issue with religion and pseudo-science with the help of model bills drafted by antichoice groups. Seriously, go read the whole report, this is important.

Glad to see some reporting on the fact that legislators spent International Women’s Day holding a hearing on CIANA

As always, this legislation affects all pregnant people, not just cis women.

An excerpt from Huffington Post:

…

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on Thursday to discuss the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), which is sponsored by two Florida Republicans, Marco Rubio in the Senate and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the House. The bill would make it illegal for anyone but a parent to accompany a young woman across state lines to seek an abortion — even if her parents are absent or abusive.

Perhaps more significantly, the bill is the latest in a long series of attempts by Republican lawmakers to criminalize physicians who perform abortions, to chip away at women’s constitutionally protected right to decide when and if they will have a child and to otherwise politicize women’s health.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), a member of both the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus and the subcommittee that heard the bill Thursday morning, said he would like to send a message to his male Republican colleagues that continue to legislate issues like abortion and birth control: Stay out of issues you don’t fully understand.

“As a father, I’ll be honest — my daughter’s not going to come to me with questions about why you would use the pill for medical reasons. She’d talk to my wife,” he told HuffPost. “My question is, how the hell will [men in Congress] know of all the intricacies of such a personal decision, an aspect of health care that’s so complicated? The absurdity of men in D.C. involving themselves with such a complicated, critical, emotional, basic right is what’s mind boggling to me.”

…

An excerpt from Mother Jones:

…

The bill requires a minor’s parent or guardian to be notified in writing and a 24-hour waiting period after that notification before the young woman can obtain the abortion.

Doctors or anyone who assists the minor without first informing her parents may be fined up to $100,000 and imprisoned for up to a year for violating this law. Thirty-seven states currently require parental involvement of some type, if a minor seeks an abortion, the law is meant to prevent anyone from traveling to another state to avoid those laws. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R) introduced the Senate version of the bill last June as well, declaring that it was an effort to ensure state parental laws are not “undermined and circumvented.”

While the sponsors insist that the law would not apply in cases of “medical emergency, abuse or neglect,” it would put the burden on the young woman to prove that she is, in fact, a victim of one of those circumstances. The Center for Reproductive Rights contends that the law would subject the young women, their doctors, and anyone who might help them to a “confusing maze of overlapping and conflicting state and federal laws—making it more difficult and more dangerous for young women to obtain abortions.”

The bill, CRR maintains, “fails to consider the reasons why a teen would turn to another adult like her grandmother or aunt for support, and could force young women to instead rely on an abusive caretaker, choose to travel alone or turn to unsafe alternatives to terminating her pregnancy.”

For those who are interested, here’s a link to the post I made about CIANA with links to the testimony of the witnesses and resources on why these parental laws are so dangerous for young people.