Abortion Gang

Anti-choice activists absolutely love to use metaphors about what abortion is like. Abortion is like the holocaust! Abortion is like genocide! Abortion is like slavery!

I recently came across this quote to that effect. The author is talking about a new facility in Ohio where women would be able to both receive abortion care and talk to and/or engage an adoption specialist:

The Choice Network is a horrible idea.  It’s sort of like a gas chamber-passport facility for Jews.  In one convenient location, we can allow the Nazi-occupied countries of 1942 Europe choose to send their Jews to the gas chambers or give them passports to countries where they will be treated as free and equal citizens.  Both options are given equal validity.  Neither option is recommended or preferred by those who run the facility.  The founders of the facility don’t care if a Jew is sentenced to death or given a new chance at life.  No matter.  Both choices are treated the same.  Though one leads to murder and one to life, the facility takes no position.

No. Abortion is not like the Jews and the Nazis, and it’s not like genocide, and it’s not like slavery. Abortion is not like any of those things. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, but apparently, it’s not. Here are some very basic, seemingly obvious reasons why abortion is not like the Holocaust, genocide, or slavery:

1) Whether you think the fetus is a person with a soul or a collection of tissues, the vast majority of abortions occur at a time when the fetus could not  survive outside the womb. In the case of the holocaust and genocide, those being killed were human beings surviving without physical dependence on another person’s body.

2) Those killed in the Holocaust, and in various world-wide genocides, were fully developed human beings with histories, families, and relationships. Abortion does not end relationships in this way, it prevents them from occurring.

3) Slavery! Abortion is not like slavery. Slavery is the ownership and exploitation of a person’s life. Abortion is preventing a life that does not yet exist from becoming one that does.

Whatever you think of abortion, it is not like anything else. It is unique. It is a medical procedure that does not end, but prevents, life. It is a medical procedure that we have, as a society, entangled in deeply suspect moral values, and objections to it generally rely on values and morals that, despite their claims to universality, are actually in the minority, and belong to a small, select group of people – people who, for example, would compare abortion to the Holocaust, or would judge black women for having abortions because abortion is like slavery.

I wonder sometimes if the people who write these hateful things do so because they feel so unjustly entitled to their incredible amount of privilege. Yes, there are anti-choice activists of color, and there are, I’m sure, Jewish anti-choice activists. But I find that the majority of anti-choice activists are white. The piece I quoted above was most certainly written by a white girl – there’s a picture – who has clearly never questioned her own comfortable privilege, or what it would mean to live as part of a group of people with the collective memory of holocaust, genocide or slavery, and what it would mean to have that experience re-appropriated by some asshole who never thought through what that experience of collective memory might actually mean for the people who live with it every single day.

I lived for a period of time in Rwanda, a country that, in the very recent past, actually experienced a genocide – or, probably more accurately, an intense civil war that resulted in deep, indescribable scars. This is a country where, as a result of the estimated one million deaths that occurred, fully 50% of the population is under the age of 18. These numbers are unheard of. It’s a country where, despite its actually liberal and forward-thinking ways (they had universal health care long before we even began debating it), men take more than one wife because there are, quite simply, not enough men, and women have decided it’s better to share a husband than simply not to have one.

A startling number of those children under 18 are the product of mass rapes that occurred during the genocide. The point wasn’t, usually, to get the women pregnant; the objective was generally to give them HIV/AIDS, and kill them slowly. Many of the women who bore children after the genocide did so because they had no access to abortion in the chaos and aftermath. In the United States, that happens occasionally. In Rwanda, it is, like the Holocaust among Jews, a collective memory of repeated trauma; the trauma of genocide, the trauma of rape, the trauma of childbirth and the knowledge that it would be necessary to raise an unwanted child who was the product of all of those previous traumas. It is startling to see. You do not forget it. You would not compare it to abortion.

As for the relationships between these women and their children who are the product of rape, I can say anecdotally that those relationships vary, like other relationships between parents and children. We knew women or heard about women who made the best of it; we knew children who had never known love because of it. We knew children who had been wanted until their parents re-married, and then they found themselves pariahs. It is worth noting, however, that abortion is legal in Rwanda under three circumstances, and one of those circumstances is rape.

Life is a crapshoot. An abortion means someone never plays. Birth control and miscarriages also means someone never plays. The opportunity to live is a much greater crapshoot than life itself.

I say to all the people tempted to make abortion about anything but abortion: don’t. It isn’t like anything else. If you must fight it, if you must insist that you know better than the women and the many, many mothers who make the decision that abortion is best for them, right now, that’s a point I’m too tired to argue. But if you must fight it, don’t be lazy, and don’t be an asshole. Do your research. Think carefully about what you say. Because every time you tell me abortion is like the Holocaust, or genocide, or slavery, I know you’re too dumb to be worth the breath it would take to argue.

Trigger warning: domestic violence.

One of my beloved coworkers at my job this summer became like a younger sister to me. She’s bold, brash, and funny, and she moved to the Big City to Make It On Her Own. I’m not laughing at that – it’s brave, and I did it myself only a few years ago, so I know what it means, and what it is like to be in that place.

She was also being stalked by her ex-boyfriend.

When she first got to the city, alone and scared and exhilarated, she met a model, a little older than her. The first few weeks of the relationship were fun, but within a month he was asking her to move in, berating her in public, and yelling at her at parties. Within six weeks, the police had been involved in two of their disputes. She left him and refused to see him or speak to him. That was when he started showing up, waiting outside her door until she got home from a bar at 4am, waiting at her subway stop, and finally coming to work to harass her, where we had him evicted by a very large man who maybe was not so gentle when he tossed him out the front door. The language he used to text her and contact her was obscene and threatening, and it made me sick just to read it as a third party.

What if she had been pregnant?

Scientific studies show a correlation between abortion and domestic abuse. I am a sociologist. Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, nor does correlation, such as the correlation between abortion and domestic abuse, explain to us how those two things are related. So here is what we do know: Women are four times as likely to suffer an increase in abuse due to an unintended or unwanted pregnancy. The pregnancy itself may be the result of abuse, which can manifest – and, let me be clear, does manifest – as “sexual abuse, marital rape, or denial of access to birth control.” Those three things can and do also happen in conjunction.

The 14% of women seeking abortions who admit to experiencing or having experienced abuse have made that decision through their experiences as a person, through their experience living their race, their gender, their sexuality and sexual orientation, and, certainly, through their experience/s with partner violence. Supporting a person’s right to an abortion is supporting their need to make that decision in a way that is informed by both their present circumstances and their past experiences.

A common explanation for the correlation between abortion and violence on “prolife” sites is that abortion causes abuse. This is inaccurate. It is damaging and it is far, far worse than being simply misleading. It is a way of twisting reality and victim-blaming that has the net result of blaming victims of abuse while simultaneously encouraging them to remain in unsafe circumstances that get less safe when they become pregnant.

There is one more, extremely serious reason that women seek out abortions when they are impregnated by an abusive partner. One of the leading causes of death amongst pregnant women is homicide by an abusive partner. Yes, you are reading that correctly: one of the most likely ways for a woman to die while pregnant is by being murdered by her partner, her husband, her boyfriend, her lover, her fiancee.

Every day, I hope, but this month particularly, we raise awareness of domestic violence and abuse and ask everyone to reach out to their loved ones and help keep them safe. If you have a friend who is in an abusive situation who then becomes pregnant, I urge you to help them immediately, and help them make decisions before they share the news of their pregnancy with an abusive partner. That decision may be to have an abortion; many people make that decision. But the decision could also be to carry the pregnancy to term and have a child, making it more vital than ever – not because a child’s life is worth more than theirs, but because now two lives will hang in the balance of the abuse, and because the abuse can increase significantly at the announcement of a pregnancy – that they find a way to be safe. A Safe Passage is an excellent place to start finding resources that are specifically for victims of abuse – at any point in their lives – who are pregnant, or are planning to get pregnant.

My job this summer was in an extremely open, sexually liberal environment, in a blue-state east coast city. But when my friend was stalked by her abuser, some of the people I worked with still wondered, out loud, “why she didn’t just tell him to go away,” because, “a man won’t bother a woman if he knows she really means it.” She should have been clearer, she should have told him louder, she shouldn’t have let it go on for so long.

Those basic assumptions about abuse are EXACTLY why people are shamed and stigmatized for so long, and they are EXACTLY the reason my friend was embarrassed when she had to tell our coworkers about her circumstances. Those basic assumptions are the problem. Those basic assumptions create warm, cozy environments for abuse to continue. Abuse will only stop when the silence is broken and no one is ashamed to say, “S/he hurt me.”

If you or someone you know is dealing with abuse – mental, psychological, or physical – please get help. You have NOTHING to be ashamed of. The law and every sense of decency is on your side. You are in the right. You are strong and powerful, and there are people who care about you who will support you in making the choices or decisions you need to make.

You are brave, and I admire you.

Editor’s note: This piece previously stated that Rick Perry’s wife had an abortion. This is incorrect (to the best of our knowledge). Rick Santorum’s wife has had an abortion. The mistake has been fixed in the text below.

Recently, it has been brought to my attention by the internet and cranky people on it that people who are antichoice hate, just simply HATE, when those of us who are prochoice insist that we are also, actually, prolife. Apparently, this made-up thing, “prolife,” is meant to designate a singularity of pro-ness, that is, “being pro anything that has ever been conceived ever being brought to term and to life no matter what the consequences.” This seems, to me, an intensely narrow definition of prolife! I will now expand that definition, for fun.

1) Prochoice is prolife because: LIFE IS AWESOME. Yes, that’s right. I think life is awesome. Therefor, I am prolife. You know what’s awesome about life? Coffee. I have some right now. Also all seven seasons of Buffy on DVD, which I am watching with my roommate. Also our cat.

2) Prochoice is prolife because: HAVING REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES LETS YOU LIVE LIFE ON YOUR OWN TERMS. Life is awesome – see above. You know what’s an awesome thing about life? Having sex with the person I care about a whole bunch, and then going to school AND working full-time and occasionally seeing a movie. Without the many reproductive choices we fight for – including, thank you to the state of New York and sexual health advocates the world over, Plan B over the counter – I would not be able to have all these things. And having these things is awesome.

3) Prochoice is prolife because: ABORTIONS SAVE LIVES. Yes. Yes they do. They really do. In fact, former Senator Rick Santorum’s wife had one to save her life. It was a good choice! Everyone should have that choice.

4) Prochoice is prolife because: PEOPLE IN THE PROCHOICE MOVEMENT FIGHT FOR THE LIVES OF THE LIVING. While antichoicers are attempting to regulate the shit out of abortion, a procedure that is safer than giving birth, during which only .3% of women experience complications, most of the prochoice people I know are much more concerned with the living. For example, a lot of prochoicers I know right now are concerned with the death penalty. Maybe you support it – I do, in some instances – but the way this country handles it has been SERIOUSLY called into question. Also, prochoicers believe in regulating the medical community, to save lives. I am working right now on getting plastic surgery regulated in the state of California because lack of oversights there have resulted in the deaths of five people from lap-band surgery. Why isn’t the “prolife” movement concerned with this? Oh right, because these people are already born. Once we get you born, you’re on your own. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, PEOPLE.

People I know who are prochoice believe that people need to be able to decide what is best for them in terms of reproduction. Once people have made that decision, people in the prochoice movement work to support them in many ways – fighting for access to education, financial support for those living on or below the poverty line, and reforms for the criminal justice system. Prochoicers believe we live in an imperfect world and work to improve it in a million ways every day. Antichoicers sit outside clinics and harass patients, and get snippy and rude online, because it is much easier to deal with a constituency of fetuses who can’t tell you what they think than it is to deal with the real consequences of a material and lived existence of needful human beings.

Look, I know we don’t want to get all sciency here, but I am so sick of listening to people say, prochoice isn’t prolife because they don’t believe in a right to be born. Um, no. No, I don’t believe in the right to be born. Where is that ever a right?? Not in the constitution. Not in the bible. Not ANYWHERE. No one has the right to be born. Pregnant people, however, have the right to make all the decisions they feel are best and necessary to carry a life to term if they so choose, and I support that right and those decisions. I think that decision is awesome. I think it is brave. I think I am super glad I am personally a long way away from making it.

I’m not usually so rude, nor do I typically lump a bunch of people together and say, “all you people are like this.” But I’m having a bit of a day, which has been preceeded by a bit of a week, which, like everyone else who cares about reproductive justice, has been preceeded by a bit of a year. So fuck it. I’m prochoice, and that makes me prolife. I’m not ashamed of anything, I’m not wrong or bad or delusional. I fight every day for good, important things, and just this once, all the people who are telling me I’m going to hell can go to hell. Tomorrow I will again turn the other cheek. Today, I just want to laugh.

As a courtesy, and to head off the barrage of comments that will now come our way that say things like, “I am pro choosing new flavors of ice cream, so I am prochoice!” from people who think they are being clever and proving a point, I will now clarify: when I say I am prochoice, I mean I advocate for people to have as many reproductive choices as possible. These include, just off the top of my head, birth control (hormonal and non-hormonal), adoption, in-vitro fertilization, abortion, and excellent pre and post-natal care for those who give birth. And also I believe in choosing between flavors of ice cream (have you TRIED this new business from Ben& Jerry’s, this Banana Buzz?! it does not matter if you do not like bananas, it tastes like whiskey and awesome, go get some). When I say someone is antichoice, I mean that they do not believe people need, deserve, or should have access to all these reproductive options and more. And that sucks.

Feel free, in the comments, to tell me why being prochoice makes you prolife. I would love to hear about it.

Working for the summer to provide direct reproductive and family planning services, the question of who gets pregnant (and who doesn’t… and who needs those services, whether they do or do not get pregnant…) has started to play a role in how I think about outreach. The language of the last reproductive justice wave was about women, “women’s health,” “women’s needs,” and “women’s rights,” and with good reason, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that that language is exclusionary – too exclusionary, to my mind, for the movement I hope to be a part of building. We’ve had the start of this conversation several times on this blog. Women are no longer the only ones who get pregnant. Many people now can and do get pregnant who do not identify as women. This war on reproductive justice may in many ways still be the “war on women” it is often referred to as, given the narrow gender identities the antichoice community too often ascribes to, but it is not only a war on women when so many people suffer in a silence imposed by language and many kinds of violence. (And what else? What else imposes this silence? Please tell me. I am writing this in the hopes that I can learn.)

So I am wondering, how do we begin to address trans issues, particularly trans reproductive issues, outside of transitioning itself? How do we make prochoice about more than the gender binary? How do we work with language? How do we do direct outreach, how do we make clinics and doctor’s offices and family planning centers truly safe spaces? What other questions do you have? I have so many!

I do not want to see hard-fought cisgender identities subsumed to political correctness. Cisgender identity is valid, and I fight to know and love myself as a woman every day. But that fight has a name and words and acknowledgement; I believe the fight for transgendered identities is silenced a billion ways. So I’m asking you to talk to me. I’m also asking you to talk to me, and to each other, respectfully. If you feel I have already made grave errors in the way this is written, please let me know and I will address them. I know sometimes there is a lot of pent-up anger that, given a release point, can feel very good to vent, but ideally, if people want to talk about this, I would love to see a productive conversation get started here.

Having taken the summer off from school and all of the required reading it entails, I am knee-deep in books for fun this summer. By far the most poignant and touching to me personally – and I can’t recommend it enough to everyone on, basically, the entire planet – is Sara Marcus’ Girls to the Front, her history of the Riot Grrrl revolution that shook punk and politics in the 90s. I promise, if you read this book, you will be shocked at how little has changed, how 20 years, two decades (and yes, friends in their 20′s and 30′s, that does make me feel old too) after the events took place, we are right back in the same position, with a far-right supreme court in place, a pervasive fear that Roe will be overturned, and women’s rights and very lives under attack. (If you think that’s an overstatement, I fucking beg you to remember Congresswoman Giffords. Every day, please. I do.)

This book makes me angry, and as a very practical girl who has been working in progressive politics in very practical capacities for a very long time, those who know me only from my writing, particularly on this blog, would be shocked at how rarely I get angry. My 18-year-old-self was furious, consumed, driven, with a passion I can barely recall. But that burns out, it eats you up from the inside – you either find a way to live with the anger and bury a lot of it, or, in my experience, you go a little crazy. The kind of anger and passion the Riot Grrrls story inspires within me is invigorating, and I have been thinking about how to incorporate that movement, its history and its meaning, into my work.

At the same time, here in the present, I work in a movement that has roots in both traditional and radical feminism, and I wonder where we will go, what we will do, what we will have the courage to demand, what we will fight for and what we will compromise. With that in mind, a quote from the book struck me particularly in relation to Abortion Gang:

“Riot Grrrl is about destroying boundaries, not creating them.” (198)

What I love about this blog is that I do not agree with everything everyone writes, nor does every writer on this blog always or necessarily even EVER agree with me. That doesn’t mean my posts don’t go up; that means I get edited into a place where my opinions are 1) clear and 2) mine and only mine. We speak from the “I” here at Abortion Gang. We do not, as individuals, speak for the whole movement or often for anyone but ourselves, yet our collection of experiences IS the movement.

Which brings me to the first thing my Riot Grrrl history has given me to move forward with in my work: consider how you speak and where you speak from. Writers on this blog share intensely personal experiences. Don’t judge. Not, “Hey, try not to judge!” or “Be accepting and open!” Fuck that. Don’t judge. Disagree. Share your experiences. Support. Argue from the “I.” But understand that everyone who writes here – everyone being commentors as well as bloggers, THNX – has a valid experience, a personal experience, that they are sharing. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE ONLY EXPERIENCE. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE RIGHT EXPERIENCE. The prochoice movement is the sum of its parts, and we are, all of us, those moving pieces of which this great and, I believe, extremely powerful thing is made.

For supporters and antis alike, remember that you are not here to persuade – and if you are, you’re in the wrong damn place. Adults write for and into this site, people with more varied and dynamic backgrounds than you can imagine. We are mothers, daughters, sons, husbands, wives, broke-ass kids, kinksters, prudes, trust-fund recipients, students, sexual deviants, queers, and allthecolors. Come here to tell us what you think, come here to argue your point, but don’t come here to proselytize – and if you don’t know the difference, come back and see us when you do. I think our fearless leader Steph summed it up best in a comment recently, and I want to make sure her extremely well-phrased words get their due, so allow me to include them here:

“I want to let you know that I’m the moderator of this blog, and the only reason I don’t approve comments is when they are disrespectful or hateful. If the comment seems borderline offensive, I ask the blogger if they want me to publish it.”

This is a place for civility, openness, and understanding. We want to engage with you, and we want you to engage with each other. In exchange for this space, we ask for your gracious understanding that we spill our guts out on this page, we tell you so many deep things that hurt and heal, and we can’t always go to bat for them relentlessly, day upon day, just because you like to argue or want to persuade. Come here with an open mind and heart and we will give you ours. It’s a good way to live. And I think it’s an amazing way to live a movement.

Herding activists closely resembles herding cats, or Members of Congress, except that activists are generally hungrier, more distracted, and less likely to be on drugs that help them maintain focus. As a result, our fearless leader and editor will frequently send us prompts for posts, with enthusiastic exclamation points and a spritely tone. We don’t always use them, but one has come up a few times and been gnawing at my edges lately: why do we stay in the movement?

The sidelines, where most Americans and many readers of this blog reside on the abortion issue, is both a perfectly fine and completely understandable place to be. Activists need and are grateful for your research, your thoughtfulness, your support and your engagement. For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to work actively in the prochoice and reproductive justice movements, let me tell you. It’s fucking exhausting.

On a personal level, we are frequently berated and disagreed with, politely and less politely. We receive hate mail. We get called terrible things and enthusiastically consigned to the depths of the belly of hell by sweet looking grandmothers. Even when people are polite, they frequently treat us as though we are simply misguided, and just looking to be saved. Many people stand in a middle-of-the-road place on the abortion issue – call it the safe-legal-rare place – and like to engage in what they think of as “interesting debate” and I have come to think of as “totally unnecessary haranguing by people with bare minimum information who think it is my damn job to educate them because they are too lazy to educate themselves and anyway they almost always want to bring God into it when the discussion doesn’t go their way.” The people who argue with us rarely feel the investment in their own cause that we feel in ours, and so are not worn out from endlessly repeating the same fucking arguments over. and over. again. The arguments are all new and fun to them; they think this is an interesting political game.

We don’t think this is a fucking game.

We are in this movement because we know – not believe, know, and have experienced firsthand – that people’s lives depend on it. Really, I can’t be any clearer: without access to abortion and comprehensive reproductive care, people die. People die from this lack every day, and we watch, and we can’t save them, and we hate ourselves, and then we turn back around and keep trying to save the ones we can. Lately, it’s been a losing battle. It sucks.

We are in this movement because we don’t need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind is blowing. Because many of our mainstream feminist forebearers thought that a little ground given was a compromise, a way to hang on to our basic rights, and we have seen that this is not the case. Every time we compromise we just draw a new line in the sand for governments and churches and antichoice crazy people to dance across, erase daintily behind them, and proceed on their merry way towards taking every single thing we have fought for. Five years ago it was absolutely inconceivable that abortion could be completely inaccessible in this great nation. Today that possibility is very real. And after abortion, they will come for birth control. And after birth control, well… “first, they came for abortion, and I said nothing, because I did not want an abortion…”

I stay in the movement because I believe the work I do every day makes it possible to get up in the morning. Because if I don’t, I failed.

I stay in the movement because if I don’t, one day I will wake up and I will need something – a pill, an abortion, a doctor who is adequately trained to provide comprehensive health care for women – and I will simply not be able to get it. I’m not rich and the work I do is never going to make me rich, and it is completely conceivable that if we fail, within the next decade, these things we think of as so basic will be available only to the very wealthy, the people the rules and regulations don’t apply to.

I stay in the movement because I believe, really believe, in freedom and independence and small government. These are things antichoicers think they have the market cornered on, but that’s just not true. They have the messaging down to a science, but much like squirrels are just rats with better PR, antichoice crap is just big government sitting in your damn medicine cabinet, walking you to your doctor’s office and telling you what you can and cannot do. And that is bullshit. My country, my body, my womb, bitch, and I will make what I believe are the best decisions for all three without your invasive surveillance, THANKS.

And then, probably most importantly, I stay in the movement for personal reasons. I stay in the movement because even when I don’t like the people I am working with, I respect them, and they almost always respect me. I stay in the movement because I am queer and loud and independent and frankly the religious right won’t have me. I stay in the movement because we drink and we laugh a lot and we create safe spaces that are also really a lot of fun, and they make me think that maybe people hate us because they’re just jealous that we’re so awesome.

My brilliant, wonderful father, who is my hero in so many things, is anti-choice. He’s also opposed to gay marriage; there are a number of social issues on which we disagree. Over breakfast the other day (an excellent time to discuss polarizing politics if ever there was one!) he brought up the problem of sex-selective abortion and asked me if, given that a severely disproportionate number of females are aborted over males, I would re-think my pro-choice stance. I said no.

The question everyone keeps asking and saying we need to address – the question of whether abortion, and the right to choose, is causing what the Economist identified last year as a “gendercide” – is, to my mind, absolutely the wrong question.

Parents in many countries are clearly deciding they do not want baby girls. Baby girls do not hold the same value as baby boys, and young girls and women do not have the value of the men those baby boys will grow up to be.

Let me be explicit: eliminating abortion access does not make this problem stop. It does not save women. When parents who are pregnant with a girl cannot abort but do not wish to keep her, they often kill or abandon her. And despite the extremely popular contrary opinion we hear so often on this blog, those of us in the pro-choice movement are not also pro-murder. Once a baby is born, it’s born. Once a baby is born, it is an independent, breathing, living being that deserves every support we as a society can offer it, and drowning it in a well or leaving it on the side of a road to die is murder. And we are against murder here! I repeat that point only because there frequently seems to be so much confusion.

So the real question is, why do parents feel the need to abort based solely on the child’s sex? I believe it is because every society in existence, at present, goes to great lengths to devalue women as a gender. We are objectified, patronized, controlled. People – generally men, with the support of a small handful of women with power and internalized sexism – decide what is best for us without our input. Women make up 51% of the population in America, and more than half of college graduates, but still comprise 10% or less of Congress. The Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy reported in May that women comprise 23% of federal and 27% of state-level judgeships (yes, they also claim “judgeships” is a word). This means in the courts, where an overwhelming number of questions on women’s rights stand to be decided in the near future, women themselves are desperately outnumbered at almost 5 to 1.

And then there’s that internalized bit I mentioned. When the women given the highest pedestals and the most attention in our nation are generally white, thin, apolitical reality TV stars, while politically conscious women are derided as bitches and “feminist” has become a four-letter word, it is hard for little girls to value themselves or want to make a difference. To hear people tell it, these days, they mostly want plastic surgery and a very large sweet sixteen party, ideally attended by Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt. And if we don’t value ourselves, why should men? Why should anyone listen to us if we’re afraid to speak because it will make us look bad, or if we’re never taught how, for largely the same reasons?

And that is just in America which, in my entirely biased opinion, actually is the most phenomenal place in the world to live (sorry, fellow Canadian bloggers). In poorer countries, where more of the population is rural, the problems are more numerous and considerably worse.

Ironically, the question of whether women should have access to abortion plays into the very same mentality that contributes to the sex-selective abortions so many concerned citizens seem to want to try and combat (and I do genuinely believe many people of the people expressing concern really do want to stop sex-selective abortions and not just control women’s reproductive choices – frankly the subject makes me want to give up, curl in a ball and cry). But that concern would be much more helpful if it were directed at the cause of gender-specific abortions – namely, the lack of value placed on women in so many societies – and perpetuating the idea that women aren’t capable of, or shouldn’t be allowed to, make their own reproductive choices only exacerbates that very problem.

When someone tells you parents abort female children more readily than male children in many countries, tell them this is not news. Ask them why they think parents value a boy more than a girl. And ask them if eliminating access to abortion and thereby once again demonstrating that women cannot be trusted to make reproductive choices for themselves but require the state to prescribe them will help address that problem of value. I am absolutely certain that it will not.

David Katz, who has M.D. in his title so you know his words carry the weight of the medical profession, has an essay up on Huffington Post, “Abortion, on Middle Ground.” And I’m sure you’ll be shocked, absolutely shocked to hear it’s the same shit, different day. Dr. Katz is a progressive who thinks abortion is a necessary evil! He is “emphatically pro-choice” but he is “just as emphatically anti-abortion.” Because, as I am sure everyone on the planet is aware and can agree completely on, “No one is ‘for’ abortion, least of all the women who resort to it.” Dr. Katz knows these women, you see. He knows them personally and understands their inner hearts. He is a listener, this Dr. Katz! He understands the hardships, what that the ladies have,  and how we need abortions even though obviously no one ever wants to have one, and also says some stuff about how our society is really violent and education is the answer.

For the progressives who feel the need to tread this middle ground out there, let me just clear something up: you cannot be both prochoice and anti-abortion. Please don’t mistake this for a “you are with us or against us” ultimatum. I hope you will instead see it for what it is intended to be: a completely rational statement meant to absolve people of the apparent epic confusion raging in their hearts as they try to reconcile conflicting personal and political beliefs. And I don’t mean that simply the personal and political are at odds; in these cases often the personal and the personal are at odds. For instance, perhaps you believe that abortion is really quite awful, but women should be allowed to have them. In this case, congratulations! You are not actually anti-abortion.

Just take a deep breath and say it with me now: I am not anti-abortion.

I am not anti-abortion, because I know it is a necessary medical procedure that people sometimes need to undergo for physical and mental reasons. I am not anti-abortion, because I know abortions save lives. I am not anti-abortion, because I have had an abortion. Yes, I’m sorry to put you in this position, but 46% of women in this country, almost fully half, will have an abortion in their lifetime. You’re allowed to be the person who says “I am anti-abortion” even though you’ve had one yourself, but that will also make you a hypocrite who took advantage of the hard work other people do when they say “I am not anti-abortion” and then disavowed that work. And I don’t think you want to be that person.

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It’s not exactly a secret anymore that “conservative” has become a tragic code word for “hypocritical.” Conservatives want small government, low taxes, and no regulation – on banks, insurance companies, and Wall Street financial institutions (incidentally, these are the people who fund their campaigns). Conservatives want to regulate the ever-loving crap out of the most private, personal matters that concern women and queers, including marriage and healthcare, no matter what it costs - and it just cost Indiana $4 million.

Did you ever hear the joke about the Jewish dilemma? Free bacon.* The conservative dilemma is similar – what to do when regulating bodies requires regulating businesses? What will win out? Will the conservative need to fiercely protect the freedoms of billion-dollar private corporations take precedence, or will the desire to tell people what they can and cannot do with their bodies based on an entirely arbitrary set of “moral” principles prove to be too strong.

The decision in Kansas would seem to indicate which way the wind is blowing, and like everything else these days, it doesn’t look good for uteri.

Kansas legislators have decided to tell insurance companies what kind of medical procedures they can and cannot cover. And they’re not looking to legislate the sale of viagra, or plastic surgery, or non-FDA approved medications – no, they’re coming right for the abortions, which are, obviously, the scourge of American society. Health insurance companies are posting unheard-of record profits while raising premiums, but the government will have no comment on that, THANKS – commenting on the fact that American consumers are getting royally screwed would be interfering with business, and you know America is built on the totally unregulated success of businesses screwing over consumers! So they’re gonna let that slide, for the good of the nation – but not abortion. Offering to cover a necessary, legal medical procedure – now that is just a bridge too far.

*Don’t worry, you can laugh – this moment brought to you by a Jew.

Men are often, historically and in the history of the present moment, great allies for women’s rights and reproductive justice. White people, men and women alike, have been great allies in the fight against racism. Straight people have been responsible for amazing gains made by the LGBTQ movement. Throughout the discourses around our nation’s most fraught issues, people at the intersection of many identities have commented thoughtfully, opening and expanding the conversation, weaving together the threads of communities to create these fragile but precious things we call “movements.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Dennis Byrne is not one of these people.

Posted on April 25th, Byrne’s article “Exploring blacks’ high rate of abortion” makes a pretty perfect outline for “How Not to Be a White Dude Talkin’ Bout Women and Race,” and how. You probably gathered that from the title, Byrne will be exploring “blacks’” high rate of abortion. Oh yeah. That’s sensitively handled. A good tip is to always try it in reverse, Mr. Byrne. How about “exploring whites’ high rate of abortion?” Oh, something sounds funny about that, doesn’t it? You might not phrase it that way. You might write, “Exploring the high rates of abortion among white women,” or something to that effect, yes? Call me crazy, but jumping off with that title does not suggest good things for the piece to follow. And yes – it does get worse.

According to Byrne,

“The rate of African-American abortions should trouble everyone and call for a calm, intelligent exploration of the causes. Not so was the response of the wedge-driving Planned Parenthood. It called the billboards an ‘offensive and condescending effort to stigmatize and shame African-American women while attempting to limit their ability to make private, personal medical decisions.’”

I would argue that Planned Parenthood called the billboards what they are – an offensive and condescending effort to stigmatize and shame African-American women. The billboards do not call for a “calm” or “intelligent” exploration – they make black women out to be baby-killers responsible for the extinction of a species (And in a country with a racially loaded history of equating black men and women to animals, that’s definitely not problematic, at all!). In Chicago, they hold black women responsible for aborting “the next world leader” – because the fate of the world hangs on your shoulders, mothers-to-be, since most children who are not aborted go on to be leaders of the free world. Don’t think of it as an unwanted pregnancy that will cost time you don’t have, money you don’t have, an education you can’t provide for it, food you can’t give it, and will require help the father and the government will not be giving you – think of it as the next world leader. Let’s not even address the guilt that might incur if the pregnant woman in question was raped, or if an abortion is a medical necessity.

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