feminist blogs

The New York Times had a piece yesterday about the "Mad Pride" movement, featuring writer Liz Spikol, who discusses and writes about mental health issues and her experiences with bipolar disorder on YouTube and her blog, The Trouble with Spikol. Here's one of Spikol's videos:

Anyone have more to weigh in and/or experience with the movement?

Last week Public Citizen petitioned the FDA to ban Ortho Evra, the birth control patch, stating

the amount of estrogen released from the Ortho-Evra patch varies widely among individual women, and those who absorb too much were at greater risk for blood clots and and other painful side effects.

"The considerable safety concern of high-dose, variable estrogen exposure tips the balance of risks and benefits against the availability of Ortho-Evra as a contraceptive," wrote Sidney Wolfe, head of the research group.

This is just the most recent move in a long history of controversy over the patch. And looking back over the Feministing reader birth control poll, some of you out there are using it. Personally, I used the patch for 6 months when it was first released, to very mixed results.

What do you all think about the possible ban? The FDA is unlikely to do anything, they contend that the risks are well known, and properly disclosed. Is banning Ortho Evra the right move?

This is a global distributional issue. This is about getting enough to eat. (I make no claim to originality here: several women* are writing on this issue right now.)

Women are roughly 50% of the world’s population, do two thirds of the work, but earn 10% of the income and control just 1% of the world’s wealth.

The price of food everywhere is going up. The major rises in agricultural yield came about because of mechanization and petrochemical fertilizers, both of which become more expensive when energy prices go up. Worse, politically attractive but resource-stupid forays into ethanol have pushed the prices of some food crops higher.

The New York Times this week said that in Peru, women urge action on food prices:

More than 1,000 women protested outside Peru’s Congress on Wednesday, banging empty pots and pans to demand that the government do more to counter rising food prices, which are squeezing the poor worldwide.

The women, some toting small children on their hips, run food kitchens, known as eating halls, for the poor.

… the women say they are struggling to provide enough food and want the government to increase financial aid so they can cover their costs.

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the eating halls each day in Peru, where about 12 million people, or 42 percent of the population, live in poverty.

The rising cost for basic foods sank President Alan García’s approval rating to 26 percent this month, the lowest level since he took office in 2006.

***

“Food prices keep on rising, and the government doesn’t pay attention to the eating halls,” said María Bozeta, director of one of three associations that represent eating halls in Lima.

All modern famines are failures of entitlement, not of food production. There’s enough food, but some people due to poverty or other barriers cannot get it. That’s the conclusion of Bengali genius and Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and the subject of his 1981 book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation — but the conclusion will not be surprising to anyone who knows the history of the Irish potato famine, when due to English policies, Ireland was a net exporter of food, keeping food prices high, while its poor starved to death because their own potato crops failed and they could not afford to buy food.

If, as seems inevitable, energy prices continue to rise, the result will not just be an increased cost to drive or transport goods. The result will be that women with dependent children living in poverty around the world cannot afford to eat. This world, taken as a whole, is wealthy enough to apply a number of solutions to that. But history suggests that women are and remain so disempowered globally that nothing much will be done.

The interplay between energy, food and poverty is complex (for example, food charity can depress local farmers’ income, preventing some hard working folks from moving up out of poverty by their own hard work); and a book-length treatment is both beyond my expertise and beyond the scope of this medium. So I’ll leave it like this: when talking about energy policy, let’s not just talk about how and where folks in wealthy countries drive, or power our televisions. Let’s remember that the policy choices that affect these things also affect whether a mother of four young children living on $300 a year, or even less, can feed herself and her kids, and let’s insist that the policy issue be framed to include her.

*The simplicity of the title is powerful, and I picked it before I found ABW’s post, where she apparently came to the same conclusion.

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch.

Every morning I seem to find some distraction on the Internet that leads to me running out the door far later than I should have left or starting my work day woefully off schedule. Usually the distraction is something like Scramble on Facebook, but this morning’s distraction was enriching and enlightening enough that I don’t feel so bad about running late (and running even later in order to share it with you folks.) A friend of mine (thanks, Eli!) linked to The Story of Stuff, a short documentary on the insidious processes that go into consumption as we know it. The video has been online since December 2007 and has apparently had 2 million viewers so I risk recommending it to a bunch of folks who’ve already seen it, but I hadn’t and I thought it important to share.

Annie Leonard, a scholar who has done many years of research on consumerism, development, sustainability, and environmental health, guides us through the linear process that drives the material economy - extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal - exposing the many moments in the process that are often left out of the big picture but which are often most telling of the damage occurs within each of these steps. I’ve seen and read many things about consumption and its effects on our world, but this movie broke things down in a clearer, more complete and more urgent way than I’ve seen before. Leonard does a good job of bringing to light the environmental, health, labor, globalization and other social justice problems inherent to the system of consumption.

Some of the facts that Leonard cites are truly frightening. One fact that I’d never heard before and found particularly shocking: when talking about the countless toxic chemicals used in production and therefore brought into our homes and our bodies, Leonard says:

Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain with the highest levels of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk. That means that we’ve reached a point where the smallest members of our societies - our babies - are getting the highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breast feeding from their mothers. Is that not an incredible violation?

I appreciated that Leonard called this a “violation,” because that’s precisely what it is. We have allowed corporations and complicit governments to violate our very bodies, as well as our environment and countless cultures and communities, simply in order to give us cheaper, more consumable products.* Leonard thankfully goes on to stress that “breast feeding is still best,” but as someone who plans to probably give birth and subsequently breast feed, that fact about the toxicity of breast milk is frightening and enraging. It really does feel like a violation - corporations and the government have allowed this shit to get into me.

Of course, there’s a large degree of agency here - we, primarily meaning Americans and other westerners, have a tremendous responsibility to reject the system of capitalism and consumption that got us into this mess. We need to wake up to the realities of what cheap, easy, and disposable all really mean in the long run - as Leonard says, someone, or more accurately many someones, are paying the real price for all of that cheap crap that many of us in the U.S. can buy easily thanks to our huge privilege relative to the rest of the world. Sometimes the people paying the price are far away and look nothing like (some of) us, but sometimes, as with toxic breast milk, we’re also paying directly and dearly. And whether we pay or someone else pays the immediate and direct costs, when it comes to the destruction of the earth, we’re all most definitely going to pay up sooner rather than later. And therefore we who live in the countries that use and abuse and benefit from the system of consumption the most have an urgent responsibility to do something about it.

Unfortunately, that responsibility and our agency to act on it are both so limited by our lack of information. The true costs of American-style production and consumption were never covered in my schooling, nor are they something that make it into the mainstream media with any depth or sufficiency. It’s easy to go through life just not knowing or even questioning how our actions and our consumption are part of a much larger system with far-reaching effects, and the profiteering corporations are more than happy to keep it that way. In such a dearth of information and truth, resources like this movie are vital and can go a long way towards providing the knowledge people need in order to understand what this culture of consumption is doing to them as individuals, to their communities, to other people, and to the environment.

Of course, it’s hard to figure out what the hell to do after looking at a video like that. I appreciate that the Story of Stuff site provides “10 Little and Big Things You Can Do”, along with a resources page that includes recommended reading and links to NGOs working on these issues.

* Note that for the most part this doesn’t mean “better” products in terms of durability and sustainability; Leonard also states that only 1% of consumer products are still actually in use just six months from the date of purchase, which boggles the mind.

I went to an awesome lecture last night about health--largely defined--and one of the take-aways that I wanted to turn-key is that there is a huge vitamin D deficiency among so many women who are afraid of getting too much sun. It may be contributing to some cancer increases and other autoimmune diseases. Experts recommend that you get 20 minutes of sun on 20% of your body between 11 am and 2 pm every day. After that it's good to protect yourself, but it's important to get a little bit of direct sunlight first.

So unchain yourself from those cubicles and computers and go outside right now!

Elaine sends on this diary she wrote for DailyKos about transparency in animal agriculture (warning: disturbing graphic at the end). She’s absolutely right: Installing video cameras in slaughterhouses is a logical and economical way to make sure that there’s some real oversight in the food industry.

I tend to differ with some vegetarians and vegans on the morality of eating meat, and I tend to differ with some meat-lovers on our individual responsibility to counter the environmental harms and animal abuses that come out of the meat industry. But I think we can all agree that there’s no need for unnecessary cruelty towards living beings, and that improper meat industry practices not only harm animals, but threaten our health. Greater oversight is a necessity, and cameras are an efficient way to do it.

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

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.

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…)

I know I don't. And it's not the duck lips speculum exam, or the awkwardness of sitting half naked in a rough paper gown, or the oh-so-personal questions they ask you. I just moved to a new city, so I had the fun job of trying to find a new provider (not that I had found one I liked in my last city either). Many of you are probably familiar with the process. First you have to ask around to everyone you know for a recommendation of someone good. Then once you've collected the references, you have to call all of those providers (maybe after you've googled them to see what other random people have to say) and see if they accept your insurance. Talk about rejection. Then, if you're lucky enough to find someone, you have to wait who knows how long to make an appointment. So fun, and we haven't even gotten to the gyno's office yet!

I know I was nervous from the moment I got in my car (in which I had to drive 45 minutes to get to someone who accepted my insurance). It was a little absurd really, I was kind of sweaty and my heart was pounding. For all the writing and advocating I do for sexual health and reproductive rights, I was a mess. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the whole experience, not knowing if the provider was going to be friendly, totally dismissive, or just rude. I've had all of those experiences and never been truly satisfied with a provider. I know that being queer adds a whole other level to it (why aren't you on birth control?!?) but I'm sure some of you straight women have similar feelings.

Then there is the part where you try and squeeze in all those questions that have been accumulating over the past year. What about this? Is this normal? How can I treat this? I've had a variety of experiences in terms of response to my questioning (and I always have A LOT of questions) but in most situations the provider always feels super rushed, which doesn't put me at ease. What if I forget something?

For a lot of these reasons, I choose to see a midwife (a nurse midwife actually). Did you know you can go to a midwife for regular gynecological care? You can. It definitely made things better, but not perfect.

What have your experiences been with gynecological care?

Cartoon from Natalie Dee