feminist blogs

Don’t you just love how much “pro-lifers” care about babies once they’re born?

The Bush administration violated federal law last year when it restricted states’ ability to provide health insurance to children of middle-income families, and its new policy is therefore unenforceable, lawyers from the Government Accountability Office said Friday.

Anti-choice Republicans were concerned that the children’s health care program would “crowd out” private insurer’s ability to make lots of money. And so the White House rejected a proposal from New York that would have covered an additional 70,000 children.

Gotta love the GOP: Where the concern for life ends at birth.

Well this is bullshit. Sen. David Vitter, a right-wing “family values” crusader and abstinence-only indoctrination architect, will likely be getting a pass in the trial of the D.C. madam he visited. Several other powerful men who visited the sex workers also won’t be at the trial.

Who will be hauled into court? Fifteen sex workers, who will subsequently be humiliated and asked about all the titillating, dirty details:

Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana and other powerful men appear likely to get a pass. Less lucky: the 15 terrified women being hauled by prosecutors into court to recount in graphic detail their past work as prostitutes — and more than 100 other former prostitutes whose names prosecutors are trying to make public.

Wednesday, prosecutors forced a 63-year-old retired PhD — her name, like those of other witnesses, now a matter of public record — to testify about inducing orgasms in her client; the government’s lawyers had similar questions for a mother of three who worked briefly for the escort service nearly 15 years ago.

Yesterday, it was the turn of a young naval officer to take the stand; the case will almost certainly end her career. The prosecutor, Daniel Butler, had the woman spell her name slowly and clearly, then had her talk about when she was “aggressive” with a client, when she was “more submissive,” when she had a difficult client (”he tried to remove the condom”) and how often she got “intimate.”

“What do you mean by ‘intimate’? ”

The soon-to-be-former naval officer looked at him in disbelief. “Touching, caressing,” she explained.

“What happened” after that? he demanded.

“Sex.”

“What type of sex?”

“Sometimes it was oral sex; usually it was normal.”

“Normal?” Butler persisted.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” the stricken witness pleaded.

“What’s normal sex?” Butler again demanded.

Judge James Robertson intervened. “He wants to know if you mean intercourse.”

Butler pressed on with more humiliating questions until the judge cut him off. “That’s enough,” Robertson said. Minutes later, the dazed woman was helped out of the room.

So the women who worked for about $40 an hour as sex workers to some of the most powerful men in the country are dragged into court and humiliated (at one point the prosecutor even asked one woman what she did about the whole sex thing while she was menstruating). But all the men who broke the law by visiting sex workers get a pass — and, like David Vitter, get to stay in office, and get to continue fighting for “family values” policies that do harm to the very women they paid to see.

Once again, I am eternally grateful for our “assholes” tag.

Who remembers the 2005 and 2006 California propositions that tried to instate parental notification rules for minors seeking abortions? You know, the ones that failed? Well, not so fast. Looks like it’s probably going to be on the ballot this year, too. Meet the man you can thank:

Jim Holman, owner of the San Diego Reader, has spent millions trying to persuade Californians to pass a law requiring parents to be notified before their underage daughter has an abortion.

After two failed ballot measure campaigns, Holman said last year that he didn’t want to try again.

But when other anti-abortion advocates, including winemaker Don Sebastiani, launched a third campaign, Holman couldn’t resist opening up his checkbook once again.

“Sebastiani was not deterred. He said, ‘We have to go back again and again,’ ” Holman said. “He led with big donations and I sort of followed.”

The result could make California political history.

The $1.8 million donated by Holman and Sebastiani so far is likely to put a parental-notification initiative before voters for the third time in four years. The measure would require a physician to notify a parent or guardian 48 hours before performing an abortion for a girl under the age of 18.

If the measure qualifies, it would be the first time since the California initiative process was established in 1914 that the state’s voters will consider the same measure so many times in a four-year period.

Planned Parenthood is arguing that Holman, while not doing anything illegal, is abusing the electoral process, and I agree. No, money alone does not get an initiative on a ballot, but if you spend $1.8 on an issue that inspires the kind of passion abortion does and don’t manage to get the just-under 700,000 signatures needed in a very large state, you’d have to be pretty damn inept. Holman is, of course, perfectly within his rights — that doesn’t mean there’s nothing unethical about it.

(more…)

Just read Ema.

This is what happens when “pro-life” policies dominate.

In Nigeria abortion is illegal unless the life of the woman would be at risk if she were to give birth.

But the Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 456,000 unsafe abortions are done in Nigeria every year.

Some women go to traditional healers to terminate their pregnancies.

Methods include trying to break the amniotic sack inside the womb with a sharp stick. This causes infection and in extreme cases the tissue inside the body can start to die.

“They’re pulling out intestines,” says gynaecologist Dr Ejike Oji, of Ipas, an international organisation working to secure reproductive rights for women.

Another method is to pump a toxic mixture of fiercely hot Alligator chilli peppers and chemicals like alum into their bodies.

“The women go into toxic shock and die,” Dr Oji said.

27 women every day. 10,000 women every year. And that’s in Nigeria alone.

Thank a pro-lifer today.

Thanks to Susan for the link.

It’s like a perfect storm of right-wing policies: The War on Drugs, women’s liberation by way of imperialism, and “freedom” at the barrel of a gun.

Khalida’s father says she’s 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.

The vast majority of the world’s opiates originate in Afghanistan. To fight drug production, the solution has been to target individual farmers and destroy their crops — without offering them any other option for survival. And the U.S. keeps mucking it up. We offered farmers other crops (wheat, etc), but once it was grown there weren’t enough buyers (I guess we didn’t think that far ahead).

And it’s not just farmers who are suffering because of these policies — it’s girls.

Angiza Afridi, 28, has spent much of the past year interviewing more than 100 families about opium weddings in two of Nangarhar’s 22 districts. The schoolteacher and local TV reporter already had firsthand knowledge of the tragedy. Five years ago one of her younger aunts, then 16, was forced to marry a 55-year-old man to pay off an older uncle’s opium debt, and three years ago an 8-year-old cousin was also given in marriage to make good on a drug loan. “This practice of marrying daughters to cover debts is becoming a bad habit,” says Afridi.

Even so, the results of her survey shocked her. In the two districts she studied, approximately half the new brides had been given in marriage to repay opium debts. The new brides included children as young as 5 years old; until they’re old enough to consummate their marriages, they mostly work as household servants for their in-laws. “These poor girls have no future,” she says. The worst of it may be the suicides. Afridi learned of one 15-year-old opium bride who poisoned herself on her wedding day late last year and an 11-year-old who took a fatal dose of opium around the same time. Her new in-laws were refusing to let her visit her parents.

Gul Ghoti is on her first visit home since her wedding six months ago. She says it’s a relief to be back with her father and mother in their two-room mud-and-brick house, if only temporarily. “My heart is still with my parents, brothers and sisters,” she says. “Only my body is with my husband’s family.” She says she personally knows of two opium brides who killed themselves. “One of the girls had been badly beaten by her husband’s brother, the other by her husband,” she says. Ghoti says she’s considered suicide, too, but Islam stopped her. “I pray that God doesn’t give me a daughter if she ends up like me.”

The life expectancy for adults in Afghanistan is 43. Almost half of all children are not enrolled in primary school. Only eight percent of girls attend secondary school. More than half of all children under 5 are suffering from moderate to severe stunting. Only 34 percent of people in Afghanistan have access to adequate sanitation facilities. For every 100 people in Afghanistan, 5 have a phone. One has internet access. Women in Afghanistan have a 1 in 8 lifetime risk of maternal death. (By contrast: The rate in neighboring Pakistan is 1 in 74; the rate in Sweden is in in 17,400).

Thanks to Miss Sarajevo for the link.

A guest-post by Kelly Castagnaro, Director of Communications at the International Women’s Health Coalition.

Despite evidence—and the efforts of Rep. Betty McCollum, experts and advocates around the world—the full House voted yesterday to reauthorize a $50 billion global HIV/AIDS relief initiative that threatens to further restrict, rather than support, expansion of HIV prevention through family planning services.

Several advocates and the mainstream media have overwhelmingly touted the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as a legacy-building success, and in one case, the “AIDS relief miracle.” Today, nearly two million more people have access to anti-retroviral medication than five years ago due to U.S. government support. However, the number of people newly infected with HIV continues to outpace the number of people on treatment —hardly a miraculous approach to sustainable public health programming.

For women and girls, HIV/AIDS is fundamentally a sexual and reproductive health and rights issue. They are vulnerable because their rights are widely violated. More than four-fifths of new infections in women occur in marriage or long term relationships. They could be protected if their access to reproductive health services and education was expanded. They could be protected if bureaucrats in Washington didn’t insist on exporting faulty abstinence and faithfulness prevention programming to communities where women cannot abstain and are already faithful.

But the real tragedy is that lawmakers have missed the opportunity to take a step towards ending, rather than managing, the pandemic by refusing to talk about sex. Sexual transmission is a leading cause of new infections worldwide. However, hysteria surrounding abortion and premarital sex has prevented lawmakers from engaging in debate about what works and what doesn’t for people who are fighting this disease in their homes, in their communities and in their countries.

Public health experts on the ground must be able to determine the best mix of prevention programming. As it stands, their hands are tied by mandates from Washington politicos who can only talk about sex publicly when their extramarital affairs and indiscretions are exposed.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a similar $50 billion bill, which the full Senate will soon consider. Let’s hope they recognize that there are no quick fixes to the global AIDS pandemic, and find a way to help women deal with their lives and their health in a humane way.

I have very little to say about this article, other than:

1. Talking about condoms and safer sex is not the same thing as demonizing abstinence, and if you’re under that impression, I sure hope that you were a legacy admission to Harvard, because otherwise that’s just embarrassing.

2. You look dumb when you complain that “there is just one lifestyle that doesn’t get recognition” and that’s abstinence. Abstinence gets recognition to the tune of more than $140 million in federal funding every year. Abstinence is discussed constantly. It is brought up in every single sex ed program. It is the subject of Congressional investigations and debates. It is studied by researchers. It is discussed in the classroom, in churches, in homes, in the news, and on blogs. Abstinence-until-marriage is discussed perhaps more than any other lifestyle choice made my less than five percent of the population.

3. You look even dumber when you complain about how mean and alienating the comprehensive sex ed folks are, and then you say stuff like pre-marital sex “deeply compromises human dignity” and leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” I can recognize that it is hard to remain abstinent, especially in the face of a very sexualized culture. I appreciate and applaud the personal strength of individuals who decide abstinence in the best choice for them. But what I can’t support is the constant attacks on sexually active people. People who have sex do not feel a constant need to tell abstinent people that their human dignity has been compromised, or that they’re dirty, or that they are secretly unhappy, or that they’re headed for total life ruin. I can understand how abstinent people may feel like society regards them as freaks because it seems like everyone else is having sex, but, statistically, most adults do have sex before marriage. It doesn’t mean you’re a freak if you don’t, but it does mean you’re making a different choice than 95 percent of the population. You can’t really expect that the choices made by the overwhelming majority won’t be normalized; you can, however, expect that your choices be recognized and respected. Unfortunately, the most vocal abstinence crusaders don’t do that. They instead choose to tell the rest of us that we’re making bad decisions and that we’re compromising our dignity as human beings. That’s far more fucked up and judgmental than anything I’ve ever heard a sexually active person say about abstinent folks.

4. You are not Ghandi or Nelson Mandela for choosing not to have sex.

5. I’m glad you’ve given this a feminist analysis, and I think there are feminist reasons for making your own sexual choices, including abstinence. But thinking that dudes are going to talk about you in the locker room and believing that oral sex is “disgusting” are not great justifications for the no-sex stance. First, if you think all men are dogs who are going to do the locker-room play-by-play, what makes you want to marry one? And why do you think that your guy will change from scum into a prince the day he puts a ring on your finger? Second, what makes you think that the constant “Don’t think about sex!” message will actually make people not think about sex? It’s the old “pink elephant” game, isn’t it? Third, if your abstinence is based in feminist theory about controlling your own body and not giving it over to men, why are you against masturbation? Fourth, could you please just stop pretending that your abstinence is based in feminism and secularism? It’s pretty clear that it’s not, and your anti-masturbation stance isn’t the only clue. If your choices are religiously motivated, that’s fine — but you really don’t need to co-opt other movements to try to trick other people out of a condom-lovin’ fuck.

6. When you’re a dude who authors an article like this and you end it with a competition between the virgin and the whore and then conclude with a quote saying “most guys out there would rather end up with a girl like Janie [the virgin],” you do all involved a disservice.

Ezra says it perfectly, so I’m just going to quote him in full:

This really seems to be the difference between liberals and neoconservatives on foreign policy, doesn’t it? Neocons envision a near-static population of terrorists, and prescribe an aggressive policy of killing them in order to rid the world of terrorism. Liberals see a dynamic population of terrorists and prescribe broad policies meant to blunt their popular appeal and deprive them of public support. Neocons looks at the liberal prescription and say, essentially, “you’re not killing enough of them.” And liberals look at the Neocons and, aghast, say, “stop making so many more.”

Perhaps we should be focusing on the fear-mongering and outright lying on behalf of anti-choicers. Amanda tackles the hypocrisy of Wright’s critics — the same people who attack him for repeating inaccurate messages about HIV/AIDS were the primary architects of Bush’s anti-science, deadly HIV/AIDS policies abroad.

And while Wright’s conspiracy theories about where HIV came from are a little whacked out, when you know the history of medical experimentation on people of color, you can understand his paranoia a little better. Heck, even today, people of color tend to receive medical care from lower-skilled professionals, and are more likely to be “teaching subjects” than white people.

None of that is to say that his statements about HIV are correct. But Wright is only Obama’s pastor, and he has never been invited to influence policy — unlike, say, Jerry Thacker, a man who called AIDS a “gay plague” and homosexuality a “death style” and was rewarded with a nomination from President Bush to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

And the mainstream anti-choice movement spreads all kinds of lies about HIV/AIDS and other diseases — except they don’t keep it in the pulpit, they bring it into the classroom. A large anti-choice website — prolife.com — “warns” people about condoms, implying that HIV can penetrate microscopic holes in latex and flat-out stating that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31% of the time. The site also says that “one out of every three teenage couples using condoms will become pregnant each year.” They further falsely claim that all STDs can be spread without exchanging body fluids:

STDs are frequently passed through “skin to skin” contact even when condoms are used. This can happen because the bacterial or viral germs that cause many serious STDs (such as human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis) do not infect just one place on your body. They may infect anywhere in the male or female genital areas.

So, even if the virus or bacteria isn’t passed through tears or holes in the condom itself, you can still get diseases because condoms don’t cover or protect all areas of the genital region. That means condoms don’t prevent many of the STD infections that take place during sexual contact.

This is what young people are learning from “pro-life” groups. And anti-choice groups are being well-funded by federal abstinence-only dollars to teach this kind of BS in the public school classroom.

But, yes, let’s be upset that Rev. Wright made a ridiculous statement about the origins of HIV to his church. After all, that will have absolutely no effect at all on what people do when it comes to HIV/AIDS prevention, but it’s a tasty news tidbit to bandy about in an effort to make Obama look like a run-of-the-mill crazy/paranoid/racially-divisive black man. Why would the mainstream media take a step back from the headline du jour and instead worry about the millions of people here and abroad who are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV? After all, that won’t have any negative public health consequences, right?