feminist blogs

Anyone remember the oh-so-controversial pro-choice ad that Manhattan Mini Storage ran last year?

Well it seems that the company is taking their support of choice a step further. According to a press release from Planned Parenthood of NYC, they've committed to donating a total of $200,000 to 5 NYC charities – including PPNYC.

Send them an email to say thanks.

The New York Times' Board blog covered this ad last week aiming to engage voters. It comes from this awesome new campaign that I've been honored to be a part of. After last night's primaries, I think we should get back to focusing on what's at stake if McCain is elected.

In honor of the "Pill Kills" nonsense and a question posed by a commenter, it's feminist polling time...

Feel free to leave anything I missed in comments!

Just in case you still had any doubts about the anti-choice movement's true agenda, the American Life League is letting it all hang out with their latest campaign: The Pill Kills!

From Christina Page at RH Reality Check:

On June 7th, the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that gave married people the right to use contraception, the American Life League, along with Pro-Life Wisconsin and Pharmacists for Life International Associate groups want you to join them in protesting in front of facilities that distribute birth control products. The national day against contraception, Protest the Pill Day '08: The Pill Kills Babies, was started to convince the American people of a simple and imaginative idea: attempting to prevent abortion is abortion too.

The campaign basically says that birth control pills kill babies (yes, seriously) and that pro-choice groups and health care centers like Planned Parenthood are only touting birth control to make lots and lots of money. (Because as we all know, there's nothing more lucrative than offering low-to-no cost reproductive health care.)

I'm actually kind of relieved by this campaign, because at least the anti-choice movement is showing its true colors. For so long, they've been trying to claim that it's all about "saving babies" by ending abortion, when their true agenda was simply to end women's control over their own reproductive future. They want to make birth control illegal. They don't even think married people should use it. And, of course, they're willing to push that agenda even if it means lying to women. You need to look no further than the campaign's talking points to spot the bullshit. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The birth control pill does not reduce the number of abortions. The only difference is that you are killing the baby earlier.

[T]he pill and other contraceptives can stop a tiny child’s implantation in his/her mother’s womb because the pill irritates the lining of the uterus so that the tiny baby boy or baby girl cannot attach to the lining of the uterus and the newly formed human person is aborted and dies. This is called a chemical abortion.

This one I love though, because it shows how anti-choicers think that anyone who wants to have sex without having a baby is just selfish:

Q: Isn’t it better to be on the pill when you are sexually active?

A: Better for whom? The pill does not prevent you from getting a sexually transmitted disease, it is not 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and you could conceive a child who gets chemically aborted before the baby’s presence is even known to you. Moreover, sexual activity outside of marriage is seriously wrong.

Lying to women and pushing your religious beliefs on others, however, is obviously all good.

Via.

By now most of us are familiar with crisis pregnancy centers, which masquerade as women's health clinics but do not provide abortions, contraception, or other medical care. Apparently they're also misleading women online. Recently a faux-clinic in Wisconsin purchased a URL that was nearly identical to the URL for the website of Family Planning Health Services, the local women's health clinic -- so women who unwittingly typed in the wrong address were redirected to the anti-choice site.

That's called cybersquatting, and here at Feministing, we're quite familiar with this concept, as some devoted anti-feminists created a parody of our site using a nearly identical URL -- though it now seems to be defunct.

But back to the faux-clinics misleading women online:

Hope Pregnancy Resource Center, which opposes abortion and doesn't offer contraceptives, banked on the fact that some people switch up the ".com"s and ".org"s when typing in Web addresses.

Hope bought the domain name www.fphs.com about one year ago, Board Chairman Rick Orrick confirmed.

That address is very similar to www.fphs.org, which is the site owned by Family Planning Health Services, the reproductive health services clinic.

Last week Hope took down the Web site after a reporter for the local paper, City Pages, began asking questions.

In other words, people who intended to get this site actually got this one.

Want to bet that some women who were misdirected to the faux-clinic's site actually ended up going to the wrong clinic in real life (after copying down the phone number and address from the website)? The women's health clinic is pretty sure this has happened:

Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend in the community. He told me that the daughter of one of their employees had gone to one of our family planning clinics. The staff prayed with her for an hour, convinced her that she was a sinner, gave her a Bible and sent her home. He asked if this was a new requirement for our federal grant. (Witty guy)

We investigated.

My third thought (after the ‘Someone’s had a breakdown’ and ‘We’ve hired a ringer.’) was that the young woman had visited the phony fphs.com website and been misdirected to the Crisis Pregnancy Center.

The crisis-pregnancy center has changed the similar URL so it no longer redirects visitors, but its own website is still up and running, including this awesomely hypocritical quote: "Remember an informed and empowered woman is one who has taken the time to get good, unbiased, factual information." This from a crisis-pregnancy center that provides misleading information but presents itself -- online and in real life -- as a clinic that provides actual health care for women? Real nice.

This is from the Safe and Legal (in Ireland) Abortion Rights Campaign's new online efforts to spread awareness about the current status of reproductive rights in Ireland. Here the first of a three-part video they're featuring on their youtube channel, where you can check out the others.

Thanks to Alisa for the link!

Anti-choicers in Oklahoma again demonstrate how much they care about women: So much that if women want to terminate a pregnancy, they’ll be forced to undergo an ultrasound, whether they consent or not. Making women undergo an unnecessary medical procedure against their will is bad enough — especially when medical professionals do not recommend unnecessary ultrasounds, and when ultrasounds are expensive and add significant and totally unnecessary costs to the abortion. But the Oklahoma law is even worse:

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest.

Emphasis mine.

Nobody should be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will. Nobody should have to undergo an invasive, expensive, non-consensual and wholly unnecessary procedure as a prerequisite for another procedure. No right-thinking person should promote a law that requires doctors to penetrate a woman’s vagina with a medical instrument against her will.

It’s disgusting. And I’m trying not to sound hyperbolic here, but it’s awfully close to sexual assault.

It’s not surprising, though. Anti-choicers are willing to do anything — even make women suffer through invasive, sometimes painful procedures (as anyone who has had a vaginal ultrasound can attest, they are not pleasant) — to punish women. It’s not about “life,” and it’s not about saving babies. It is about controlling, punishing and doing harm to women who make unapproved sexual choices.

In honor of the Reproductive Justice Week of Action that Jessica posted about last week, I wanted to share a few of my own thoughts about RJ as well.

In my day job, I work at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, whose work is based on the principles of reproductive justice (RJ). I spend a good amount of my time talking to people about reproductive justice, usually with the Latina/Latino men and women that we work with. I really like the framework because I think it provides us with a wholistic and broad-based way of bringing in all the issues we care about, through a feminist lens.

When I talk about RJ, I talk about it as being about people's right to create the families they want to create. The work that we do as part of the reproductive justice movement is all about ensuring people's right to create these families (when and how they want to create them), and that can encompass A LOT of different issues. For example, there are the obivous ones, like reproductive health care access. You can't create the family you want if you don't have access to things like birth control, abortion and prenatal care. It also encompasses things like immigration status, socioeconomic conditions, job security, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race and discrimination, spirituality, environmental conditions.

Each of these issues has an impact on our ability to create the families we want to create, and therefore must be a part of the repro justice movement. It's a philosophy that emphasizes the intersectionality of the many social justice issues, and I'm a big fan.

Join NARAL Pro-Choice New York for a Forum
On Reproductive Choice in New York
Friday, April 25th
6 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Albert Nerken School of Engineering at Cooper Union
51 Astor Place (between 3rd and 4th Avenue)
Wollmann Auditorium

NARAL Pro-Choice New York is holding a forum next week on the history of reproductive choice in New York, the present threat to Roe v. Wade, and why we need to pass the Reproductive Health Act.

For help identifying your State Senator please contact cfraker@prochoiceny.org

Good news:

Disability rights advocates and medical ethicists praised a precedent-setting ruling Friday by the Illinois Appellate Court denying a bid to sterilize a mentally disabled woman against her will.

The woman, identified only as K.E.J. in court records, isn’t capable of raising a child on her own, but her guardian failed to prove that sterilization would be in her best interests, a three-judge panel in Chicago ruled unanimously.

[ . . . ]

The ruling was the first appellate opinion on the issue in Illinois.

 

“It’s extraordinarily significant” because it guarantees the disabled a court hearing, said Katie Watson, a Northwestern University professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of about two dozen medical ethicists.

[ . . . ]

K.E.J., 29, suffered a brain injury as a child when she was struck by a car. As a result, she cannot be left alone to operate a stove or perform most household chores.

The woman lives with her aunt, who was appointed as her guardian in the mid-1990s. In 2003, the aunt filed a “petition for tubal ligation” in Cook County Probate Court, arguing that her niece had a bad medical reaction to other birth-control methods.

At a bench trial in 2005, K.E.J. testified that she hoped one day to have children. “I will love taking care of them,” she said. “I will love, you know, to see how they grow.”

Seeing our atrocious history on forced sterilization in this country, I’d say that this ruling is oh, several decades overdue. I personally found both Pregnancy and Power and Killing the Black Body to be excellent primers on this subject as well as great books (but I’m sure that there are other great books I haven’t read that focus primarily on this issue — if you know them, leave the titles in the comments). But the simple version of the facts is that for many decades, America participated in and promoted forced sterilization of those who were deemed unfit to pass on their genes. That included women of color, the poor and those who were referred to as “feeble-minded” — disabled women (the phrase was also used to justify sterilization of other socially-scorned women, like those who were promiscuous or sex workers). Many people believe that this is still happening, like with the Norplant situation several years back (also covered in Killing the Black body), and there is more or less undeniable evidence that it is still happening to non-English-speaking women and the disabled.

We often treat disabled people as though they are undeserving of certain things in life, and sexuality and parenthood are pretty high up on that list. I do not think that being unable to raise your children on your own makes you unworthy of giving birth to and raising children. And I certainly don’t see any justification for a forced-sterilization of a woman who has made it clear that her wishes are otherwise; we need to see it as equally heinous to forced-birth and forced-abortion. By it’s very nature, a fundamental right is not conditional, and believing in reproductive justice means believing in it for all. And so I applaud the court and congratulate disability activists on this win; I can only hope that the success continues.

via FRIDA