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William Saletan takes on the “abortion is genocide” campaign, pointing out that guns are really killing a lot of African-Americans, but the “pro-life” movement doesn’t seem too concerned — in fact, they’re unapologetically pro-gun.

The numbers are provocative. But there’s something odd about the billboards. The child who appears beside the text is fully born. Abortion doesn’t kill such children. What kills them, all too often, is shooting. If you wanted to save living, breathing, fully born children from a tool of extermination that is literally targeting blacks, the first problem you would focus on is guns. They are killing the present, not just the future. But the sponsors of the “endangered species” ads don’t support gun control. They oppose it.

Two months ago, the Violence Policy Center issued an analysis of black homicide rates based on the latest FBI data. The national U.S. homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000 people. Among whites, it’s 3.1 per 100,000. Among blacks, it’s 20.9 per 100,000. That’s four times the national rate and seven times the white rate. In 82 percent of black-victim homicides in which the fatal weapon can be identified, it’s a gun. And 73 percent of those gun deaths are inflicted by handguns.

The report calculates that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, blacks were 13 percent of the U.S. population but suffered 49 percent of all deaths by homicide. And the problem has been getting worse: From 2002 to 2007, the number of young black males killed by guns increased by more than 50 percent.

Maybe that’s why blacks, unlike whites, strongly favor gun control. In a Pew poll taken last year, whites said by a plurality of 50 percent to 44 percent that it was more important to protect the right to own guns than to control gun ownership. But an overwhelming majority of blacks, 72 percent to 20 percent, said it was more important to control gun ownership.

Saletan highlights the hypocrisy of anti-choicers raising a stink about race, when gun fanatics have pretty solid Klan roots — or, as he so beautifully phrases it, “People who live in glass hoods shouldn’t throw stones.” Indeed.

February 17th marked the beginning of the 40 Days of Life campaign, which is basically an excuse for anti-choicers to harass people outside clinics even more than usual for 40 whole days. If you need to access a Planned Parenthood or a similar clinic, be aware that the crazies will probably be on your ass.

BUT... oh, how I love reproductive rights activists. There is an excellent response campaign (hat tip to Feministe, who posted about this) called 4000 Years for Choice. This is especially great to check out in honor of Women's History Month. One need only take a look at their timeline to see that women have been finding ways to control their reproduction for thousands of years.

And guess what? 4000 trumps 40.

Apparently your boyfriend is freaked out by your NuvaRing and doesn’t understand how the Pill works. And apparently unmarried ladies and gents across America are similarly confused! (PDF)

Here are some very frightening statistics:

-Among people who are in sexually active relationships and want to prevent pregnancy, 19% use no contraception at all. 24% use contraception inconsistently.

-42% of men and 40% of women believe that your chances of getting pregnant within one year while on the birth control pill are 50% or greater (the pill is actually about 92% effective with typical use).

-18% of men believe you can reduce the risk of pregnancy if you have sex standing up.

-24% of American singles believe that using two condoms is more effective than using one.

-25% of young men believe that douching after sex can prevent pregnancy.

-29% of men and 32% of women reported knowing “little or nothing about condoms.” 78% of men and 45% of women said the same about birth control pills.

And 90% believe they have all the knowledge they need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy.

American singles think we know a lot about pregnancy prevention, but in reality we not only know very little, but we also have a lot of totally bad information that we happily act on (the Fox News-ification of sex, if you will). So thanks, abstinence-focused American sex education system, which teaches us that birth control doesn’t really work and that condoms are kind of useless. And thanks, lack of universal health care, for making sure that young people aren’t able to actually go to the doctor to get the information and preganancy-prevention tools they need. But uh, glad to know that people are gettin’ to it in positions other than missionary I guess.

Last month, Renee wrote about the “Black children are an endangered species” billboards. Now the New York Times has picked it up, in a story about how the anti-abortion movement is using race and accusations of genocide as a way to “court” supporters of color to a traditionally white, long-racist movement. The anti-choice strategy has been to hire a handful of women of color to travel around the country telling African-Americans that abortion is part of a decades-old conspiracy to kill off black people.

The tactic seems to be working, at least to a point. And it works in large part because there is a long history of trying to curtail the reproductive capacities of men and women of color. The term “black genocide conspiracy” might be met with a lot of eye-rolling from white people, but there is a legitimate back-story that enables such a theory to take hold and to grow, and there are legitimate concerns about population control and the targeting of families of color. Tuskegee. Puerto Rico. Mississippi appendectomies. Women’s bodies were used as vessels to increase the slave population, and enslaved women had no legal right to their own children. After slavery, the reproductive coercion flipped, and people of color in the United States (or people wanting or forced to come to the United States) faced anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigrant policies, mandatory sterilization and the wide embrace of eugenics. Through the 20th century and into the 21st, the bodies and reproductive capacities of women of color were used as political warning signs — Reagan’s welfare queen, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and on and on.

And it’s not all “history,” either. Louisiana, last year. Criminal courts today. Women are paid to be sterilized, or otherwise coerced out of reproducing if they’re the wrong color or the wrong socioeconomic class, or if they’re addicted, or if they’re disabled.

All women face attempted infringements on their reproductive rights. But women of color in the United States have faced those infringements in a very particular way, and that’s in part why the “abortion is genocide” argument resonates.

But of course, the curtailing of reproductive rights and options for women of color (and for all women) is another piece of a long history of not allowing women to make the best reproductive choices for themselves. As Pamela points out in a really great take-down of the abortion-is-genocide argument, women of color in the United States are sorely under-served when it comes to reproductive health care (and health care generally), and it’s literally killing them. From her article:

-Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at a later stage and are more likely to die of cervical cancer.

-Black people make up 13 percent of the population in the United States yet account for more than 49 percent of AIDS cases. AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women between the ages 25 to 34, and the second leading cause of death for Black men between the ages 35 to 44.

-Black and Hispanic women have the highest teen pregnancy rates.

-Forty percent of Black Americans report being uninsured at some point from 2007 through 2008.

-Black women continue to die from breast cancer at alarming rates and a recent study found that half of Black teenage women reported having had one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases.

The anti-choice solution is to shut down Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides healthcare to under-served and low-income communities, and to try to outlaw abortion and even birth control. Only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related; the vast majority of what the organization provides involves pre-natal care, STI screening, sexual health information, gynecological care, birth control prescriptions, even flu shots. When you shut down Planned Parenthood, you aren’t ending abortion — you’re cutting off access to some of the most in-need women and men. But the anti-choice logic is that no women (and especially no women of color) should be allowed to make their own choices when it comes to their reproductive lives. Oh and also that black women are perpetuating genocide by terminating pregnancies.

That logic doesn’t just apply to abortion. Anti-choicers are also trying to cut off access to contraception, so that women won’t even be able to avoid unintended pregnancy. Programs that pay low-income and drug-addicted women to be sterilized? Funded and run by anti-choice, “pro-family” Republicans. Some of the biggest voices in the anti-choice movement still go around saying that Chinese people eat babies, for Pete’s sake. “Pro-life” Republicans oppose health care reform that would help women and babies; they oppose funding organizations that provide reproductive health care; they regularly oppose funding for pre-natal and well-baby care, for day care, and for aid to families with dependent children. In a nutshell, “pro-life” organizations oppose the things that prevent abortion, and then oppose the things that would make it easier for women to choose to give birth, and then oppose things that improve the lives of mothers, families and children.

But they would like to outlaw abortion and legally compel you to carry pregnancies to term.

Miriam notes that no one needs that kind of condescending “help,” and that the divide-and-conquer strategy to curtail women’s rights is not going to work. Women of color have long worked for reproductive justice — whether that’s securing abortion rights or pushing back against environmentalist population control arguments or fighting against welfare reform. To suggest that abortion rights are genocidal and that women of color are either sitting idly back or killing their own children erases all the work that women have done to secure rights for themselves.

What women — all women — actually need is access to reproductive health care and education (and go read that link, it’s a phenomenal piece). The fact that women of color have significantly higher abortion rates than white women should give us pause; so should the fact that the United States has a much higher abortion rate than countries in Western Europe where the procedure is widely accessible. Abortion isn’t shameful, but it is something that most women would like to avoid. The crucial piece to a low abortion rate, world-wide, is access to contraception. It also doesn’t hurt to have universal health care and family-friendly policies that enable women to bear and raise children without facing poverty, job loss or total life upheaval.

There are long-standing systematic blockades in the way of women in the United States accessing a full range of reproductive rights. Women who fall outside of the white/heterosexual/cisgender/able-bodied/middle-or-upper-class identity face even taller barriers to access. Eliminating those barriers, though, takes work. It takes dedication to women’s health and women’s lives. And dedication to women’s lives? Is not something that anti-choice organizations do.

This is kind of terrifying. Researchers asked men and women who were trying to avoid pregnancy how they would feel if they or their partner got pregnant — whether they would be “Very upset, a little upset, a little pleased, very pleased, wouldn’t care.” The results?

Results: Staggeringly gendered! Forty-three percent of young men responded that they would be “a little pleased” or “very pleased” by the news; only 20 percent of women answered the same. Men also proved more comfortable with an unplanned pregnancy at an earlier age: Thirty-four percent of men 18-19 said they would be pleased. By the time they reach age 20-24, 42 percent of men said they would be pleased. And over 50 percent of men aged 25-29 would be pleased by the news. Remember: this is only among men who deemed it “important” that a pregnancy not occur at this junction.

Women, though, were generally less pleased — 16 percent across the board for women 18-24, 29 percent for women 25-29.

So what, exactly, is going on? Are dudes’ biological clocks just ticking faster? Is it a weird territory-marking thing? Are they just excited to know that their sperm worked, as someone suggested in the comments over at The Sexist? Is this a way for them to enter into a certain lifestyle they might want (a wife, kids, etc) without having to make serious decisions or admit they actually want it? Anyone?

Thanks to Amanda for the link.

As I start to write this article I have the uncontrollable urge to ask Utah: are you kidding me?

I was alerted yesterday by Amplify that Utah’s congress overwhelmingly passed legislation that will criminalize women for miscarriages if it is determined the pregnancy ended as a result of “intentional, knowing, or reckless behavior.”

The bill is riddled with clauses that leave the state wide open to re-colonize the body of Utah women. One cannot help but think of The Handmaid’s Tale when reading about these new laws.

Among the highlights of the new legislation, the bill applies the legal standard of an “intentional, knowing or reckless act of the woman” as punishable as criminal homicide. The law also removes immunity from women who seek illegal abortions and specifically calls out women “upon whom a partial birth abortion is performed.”

This legislation is so potentially destructive to women’s civil rights that the ACLU has taken up the case. In their letter to Utah Governor Herbet, the ACLU outlines some good points about this absurd new law: under these laws, a woman not wearing a seat belt could be charged with reckless homicide if a crash occurs. Likewise, a woman could be charged for refusing certain prenatal care if harm later reaches the fetus.

To understand just how insidious this legislation is, consider this: Utah law requires that parents give written permission for unmarried children under 18 to receive information about family planning services.

Also consider the fact that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. In a state where women still get married under 20, when the risk is even higher, how is this new law going to be enforced?

Many of us can predict the damage this legislation will do to women of color. African American women in particular have historically born the brunt of the legislation meant to criminalize woman for drug use during pregnancy (for a comprehensive history check out Dorothy Robert’s Killing the Black Body).

Besides racial background, women seen as deviant are sure to become targets of the new laws. I know from personal experience that deviance of any kind makes an individual stand out like a sore thumb in this religious community. Reputation, social status, image, and race are sure to play a huge role in the prosecution of this new law. That is, should it be enforced.

Despite their record for ass-backwards legislation and lack of regard for the rights of non-White, non-male, non-upper class, non-Mormons among us, this state does not operate in a vacuum. There is already talk that some crazies in Iowa are going to push for similar legislation.

Are we going to allow this new brand of misogynistic politics to become a national trend?

Will Neville, author of the Amplify article and who is from Utah, believes all we must do is refuse to be quiet about this: “Utah conservatives love to legislate their twisted version of morality — but they hate it when the rest of the country calls them out on their bigotry. So that’s exactly what we need to do.”

I take heed to Neville’s plea that everyone who reads about this legislation informs someone else about it. Utah deserves to be nationally shamed for this appalling legislation.

Saw this on Women's eNews, and wow!

The Utah state House & Senate have both passed versions of a bill that would criminalize a woman’s “intentional, knowing, or reckless act” leading to a miscarriage. The bill uses the terminology “illegal abortion,” and specifically notes that a woman cannot go to prison for a legal abortion.

The impetus for such a measure came from an event involving a 17 year old girl who paid a man to kick and hit her stomach to induce miscarriage. (As a side note, she did eventually give birth and gave the baby up for adoption). The woman could not be charged because she was “not in the third trimester,” (during which point she would fall under Utah’s feticide laws).

As many have pointed out already, the language in this bill is incredibly dangerous, not just from an anti-choice perspective, but from an anti-woman perspective. “Reckless” behavior is incredibly subjective, and does not fit with the supposed original intent of the legislation– to protect against the arrangement of a assault to terminate a pregnancy.

Criminalizing the behavior of a pregnant woman is a dangerous concept. Utah Senate Democrats are attempting to remove the word “reckless” from the legislation, since its definition is unclear. A woman who returns to a domestic violence situation could be prosecuted, or one who drinks too much alcohol. Or, consider falling down the stairs, like this woman, falsely accused of attempting to end her pregnancy. The mother of two was hospitalized after a fall down some stairs. She was then accused of attempting to terminate her pregnancy, because she expressed concerns about caring for a third child to hospital staff. This was apparently grounds enough to be accused of feticide. Charges were never brought, however, and the woman is speaking out against false accusations, which she believes were brought on by personal views of medical workers.

“My name is ruined. Just Google it,” she said. “Now I won’t even be able to get a job.”

As Jezebel points out, 15-20% of pregnancies result in miscarriage. It’s a painful reality for some hopeful mothers, but at what point do we start investigating the actions of a woman that may have contributed to the miscarriage? At what point do we criminalize behaviors or remarks by women who are pregnant?

As the Executive Director for National Advocates for Pregnant Women says:

“For all these years the anti-choice movement has said ‘we want to outlaw abortion, not put women in jail, but what this law says is ‘no, we really want to put women in jail.’”

You know, if they were really pro-life, they would also criminalize masturbation and menstruation. Every sperm is sacred! Every egg is a potential baby!

Snark aside, I do think it’s interesting that anti-choicers will put significant effort into a bill like this and into, say, prosecuting women who use drugs while pregnant, but they do absolutely nothing about the fact that enormous numbers of fertilized eggs — unique, individual lives, they argue — naturally fail to implant and are flushed out of a woman’s body. When I bring this up with anti-choice people, they always point to the causation factor — abortion is bad because a woman takes steps to end a pregnancy. It’s the difference between murder and natural death. Prosecuting women who used drugs while pregnant and gave birth to stillborns is acceptable because the woman did something which may have ended the baby’s life (that’s scientifically debatable, but a detour from the actual point of this post, so I’ll leave it alone for now). The Utah miscarriage law is understandable because it targets women who intended to have miscarriages.

I understand that. We do hold people more culpable for things that they do on purpose; we also hold people accountable for a lot of things that they do negligently. My question, though, isn’t with the punishment aspect, but with the activism aspect. Let’s say that we take anti-choicers on their word that they really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is a unique, individual human being, and that the death of that egg is like the death of a person. If that’s the truth, then why no activism around trying to find a cure for the close to 50 percent of fertilized eggs that naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the woman’s body? Sure, it’s not intentional, but if there were some disease that killed 50 percent of all five-year-olds, I’m pretty sure we’d be doing something about it, no?

I realize this is all pretty far afield from the actual Utah legislation, but it’s illustrative, I think, insofar as it demonstrates that the concern here isn’t really about fetuses or life or any of that. It’s about punishing women.

Amelia, a 27-year-old Nicaraguan woman, has a ten-year-old daughter. She also has cancer and desperately needs treatment, but is being denied care because she’s pregnant. Abortion is entirely illegal in Nicaragua, even in a case like Amelia’s where she needs a therapeutic abortion to save her life. In Amelia’s case, it’s not just abortion that is being denied — it’s treatment for the cancer as well, since such treatment could harm the fetus. Amelia might die and her ten-year-old daughter may be left without her mother because of “pro-life” orthodoxy.

Women’s groups are asking for help. Please visit RH Reality Check to see the full list of contacts – and please, send emails and spread the word.