Abortion Gang

Have you heard about the swingles? I didn’t until a week or two ago at a wonderful lecture at the 92nd Street Y called Running in Heels: Where are the Women Candidates for 2012–and how can we get more of them? Swingles are the single women voters who are poised to make or break this election season. We know that women more often stray from party lines than men. We know that women are more likely to vote for Democrats. Forget the swing states, bring on the swingles.

Eager to learn from a powerful and knowledgeable group of women, I listened intently to graceful and witty moderator Chelsea Clinton and the panelists, who captured a wide swath of society engaged in this issue from the captain of a rogue PR mission to a woman brought into the limelight from Rush Limbaugh’s latest idiocy. And learn from them I did.

Much of the unity among the panelists came from encouraging women to run for office as a public service, as serving others is generally very appealing to women. Though Sandra Fluke voiced the dangers of using this framework, it was generally accepted. And so I thought to myself is this why more women don’t run?

Only Sandra Fluke brought up structural barriers to women running for office to the table. A woman who wasn’t even supposed to sit on the panel originally, as two months ago we wouldn’t have known her by name. And so I thought, if the players aren’t addressing structural barriers, who is?

One fact from the Rutgers Report that folks across the panel kept coming back to was how women need to be encouraged to run for office repeatedly. Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List followed this with a great anecdote of how she has mothers with young children who are contemplating running for office call Kristen Gillibrand or Debbie Wasserman Schultz to talk out the real life feasibility of governing and mothering. Now there’s a conversation I would like to a be a fly on the wall for. Maybe we need to take these conversations to a more public forum? If it can encourage one or two women to run, why couldn’t it encourage more?

But it was the declaration at the very end of the panel that really taught me something. The panelists agreed that it is the “peacemakers” who are to be celebrated. Those who compromise in politics are the ones that get things done. Now, I can understand the resident politician falling in line with this, but there was only one on the stage. Heads simply bobbled as “culture warriors” specifically working on issues like abortion were called out. This was brief at the very end, and the only time abortion was mentioned. It made my heart sink. One panelist went so far to say that women wanted to be “more than their ovaries.” Umm yes, we know! But they do have ovaries and should be able to do whatever they want with them, and actively need to defend that, thank you very much.

How can these prominent political players not see that compromise is important but not always the answer? Maybe they do but are afraid to talk about it? Is that why there are so few women in office? Maybe it’s that we’re not all compromisers. There are things one cannot compromise on, and those issues must be defended. How did we get stuck with Hyde again?

If you’re interested in Chelsea Clinton and Sandra Fluke girl crush material check out this great clip from the lecture as they discuss Rush Limbaugh as a common enemy. Want even more? You can watch the whole talk here.

These are composites of clients and the names are pseudonyms.

Marina wants to keep this pregnancy but has an eight-month-old daughter at home and just started a new job. She tells me she’s certain she can’t be a good mom to her daughter, financially or emotionally, if she has another baby so soon. She cries during and after the procedure. She tells me that she knows she “has to do this” for her daughter, but it hurts a lot. She naps a little in the recovery room and I give her my phone number when she leaves.

Leslie, who is trying to escape an abusive partner, tells me that she fears that bringing this pregnancy to term would keep her forever tied to him. She has a warm smile and is very open with me as she describes the shelter where she is staying with her two young children and the restraining order she has against her husband. She flinches a few times during the procedure but is able to talk through it and is surprised when it’s done. She tells me it was much quicker and easier than she thought it would be. The social worker who did her counseling prior to the procedure gave her a lot of resources and I make sure she has a chance to speak to the social worker a second time before she leaves.

Deana emphatically refuses my proffered hand and snarls at the nurse. Later, in the recovery room, she apologizes, telling me, through tears, that these last few weeks have been really stressful. She loves the hot pack I’ve given her and we talk about how to make one at home by filling a large sock with rice, tying off the end, and sticking it in the microwave. She assures me that she is going to go home and sleep this afternoon and will make sure her partner pampers her.

Like OWS, reproductive justice is clearly beyond grappling with one issue at a time, as perhaps all “movements” are.  We are in need of the recognition that taking to the streets to keep Planned Parenthood’s doors open is not enough.  At the same time we need to discuss AND protest the cultural conscience targeting poor women and the cultural discomfort with women’s sexuality. Theory has linked issues like these for years.  Practice has begun to effectively connect people to a wider range of services to attack the many facets of reproductive injustice. But to my knowledge, the progress of incorporating the complexity of intersectionalities in these other realms is not being seen in demonstrations.  We have been so reactionary with the egregious seemingly unending attacks that we have not tackled this gap. It is time reproductive justice advocates looked to the OWS model and heeded its call for intersectional demonstration.  Whose streets?  Our streets!

I have been lucky enough to have never had a real job. Yes I spent many a summer among six year olds, but I have never worked for a for-profit company, never stood behind a counter, never taken someone’s order.   Over the past five years I have been even luckier to almost exclusively work for organizations dedicated to reproductive health and rights.  Now after landing my first job out of grad school, the first gig I plan to stay in for more than two years, it seemed about time to put all the knowledge I have garnered to work for someone else.

1. Don’t be afraid of networking.  Just because you’re a self-righteous crusader doesn’t mean a job will magically fall into your lap.  Lots of people do lots of incredible things.  It’s who you know AND what you know.  Possibly in that order, but you need both.

2. Know what you’re talking about.  And I don’t mean be able to recite Gonorrhea symptoms or what TRAP stands for.  I mean stay on top of the organizations and issues you love EVERY DAY.  Get on Twitter and Facebook and RHReality Check and set-up a Google Reader to guide you through the rest of that internet thing.  Perhaps most importantly read feminist theory, old and new.  It’ll inspire you.  Don’t forget books.

3. Find a mentor, or two.  Sometimes it takes someone else believing you for you to believe in yourself.  Sometimes you just need to talk to someone older and wiser who understands how badly you want to change the world.  And when you find a mentor, don’t let them go.

4. Keep your activist friends and make new ones.  Not everyone you love is going to care about vaginas the way you do, but there will be days when you’ll want to pick-up the phone and cry over a Governor’s veto override or celebrate the IOM. It’s essential to have people on speed dial for these pivotal moments.

5. Grapple with and respect the complexities of reproductive health, justice, and rights.  Analyze yourself and where you fit into these intersections.  Where you are an ally, an activist, and perhaps most importantly inapplicable?

6. Obtain marketable skills.  Bleeding heart activist does not go on a resume but is still a requirement for the job.  Find hard skills like communications, development, clinical, legal, and research that excite you and pursue them.  Volunteering is a great way to do this, and can often lead to a job.  Remember, there needs to be a reason to hire you.

7. Judge what you’re up against.  Sex is, well, sexy.  Lots of people leave undergrad thinking they are the first to bring condoms or Take Back the Night to their campus.  You’re not.

8. Be nice.  If I could give anyone one piece of advice it would be this.  This planet is small, your city/town is smaller, our universe, minuscule.  People will remember you and they will show-up when you least expect them, so be nice.

9. Fear not grunt work.   If you do a good job with copying they will give you fun stuff to do, I promise.  It just might take a year or three… but we all must suffer through maintaining calendars and wrangling space phones, no matter how smart or passionate or deserving you are.  At least one day you might take pity on an intern and order a shredding truck instead of making her/him do it by hand.

10. Remember the economy sucks and do not give-up!  I too worked outside of reproductive health but I came back to it within two years and you can too!  Do not forget that there are relevant skills that you can gather outside the field to help you land that perfect position.

This post is part of the Birth Control Blog Carnival sponsored by the National Women’s Law Center and Planned Parenthood.

Birth control should be free for women. We’ve all heard that every dollar spent on family planning saves four. Economically, it is a no brainer. Politically, it becomes a bit more complicated as, heaven forbid, a politician endorses happy and safe sex lives. Personally, I would like stop spending 35 bucks a month on pills. That money could easily be reallocated to Chinese food or shoes, still fueling our ailing economy. The problem is there are many other players between me and my pink round pill pack. In fact, there are so many that I’m not going to list them all here (think insurers, pharmaceutical firms, pharmacists, pharmacies, etc). So how can we make birth control free?

Just on Tuesday an advisory panel from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended eight women’s health preventive services be added to the government mandated list of services provided and paid for by health insurance companies at no cost to patients. Included in the list was the following: “a fuller range of contraceptive education, counseling, methods, and services so that women can better avoid unwanted pregnancies and space their pregnancies to promote optimal birth outcomes.”

So now birth control will be “free” (if by free you mean still paying an arm and a leg to health insurers who will end-up economically benefiting from paying for your said “free” birth control)? Right? Well, not quite. IOM made the recommendation to yet another government body, Health and Human Services (HHS). The big kahuna if you will. Now HHS needs to decide if these recommendations will actually be included on the no cost consumer list.

All said this is probably not going to change overnight. If it does, Chinese takeout for all! But in the interim, as a public health nerd, I have to ponder if free birth control is even a good idea. Hear me out.

I want you to imagine two shopping bags. One full of free swag from an event you paid to attend, the other a brand new purchase of totally your own choosing. Think about the contents of each, number of items, colors, shapes, perhaps even smells. Okay. Now you only get to keep one, which one do you take?

The purchased one, right? Unless of course your free swag bag is from the Oscars, I imagine it contains flyers, shampoo samples, and, if you’re lucky, a few granola bars. I cannot imagine getting a new pair of shoes or hot General Tso’s chicken for free, and I’m pretty sure neither can you. That’s the problem. Although birth control should be free for women and society would benefit on a multitude of levels from it being so, women might not take the same stock in their birth control if it’s handed to them. It might not seem as valuable, and then possibly effective, or useful, and that is exactly what we want to try and avoid.

Not convinced? Neither am I. Most women, most of the time, don’t want babies. I watched a documentary this week where a woman walked three hours in the blistering African sun just to see if contraception had arrived at her “local” clinic. Women everywhere really want this stuff. They will go to great lengths to get it whether it is walking miles or listening to Michael Bolton on hold for three hours. What really sold me on women’s value of even free birth control was asking friends this question: what is the best part about going to the gyno? I know, I know, it is all awful. I too have seen the Vagina Monologues 12 times. But there is one good thing. Free samples! Everyone uses those free birth control samples and they get so excited. It’s a little surprise win for suffering the fate of the duck lips. Everyone who I talked to, in my very limited and skewed but loving sample, agreed that they actually use them. That in fact they end up using them more correctly and consistently because they are just sitting around their apartment and there is no need to go to the pharmacy once a month (but that is another battle altogether).

So women use free birth control. We’ve seen it in action. Maybe getting it for “free” from insurers would *gasp* encourage women to use birth control more consistently and correctly. Maybe that could make for happier, healthier families, women and sex lives. Maybe.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court came down with a 5-4 decision in Wal-Mart v. Betty Dukes, perhaps unsurprisingly in favor of Wal-Mart.  Betty Dukes and 1.5 million other women who have worked at Wal-Mart since 1998 brought a class action lawsuit against the corporation based on the grounds that they were being discriminated against based on their gender.  In their view, women at Wal-Mart were less likely to be promoted and were paid less than men for the same positions.

Now, equal pay for equal work is not new news.  Today, women in the U.S. make 77 cents for the dollar a man makes.  Last year, the Paycheck Fairness Act failed in the Senate by the two votes needed to withstand a filibuster.  This battle is clearly on going on many fronts, but as Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer, it plays a particularly pivotal role.  What I found most distressing is that the Court essentially gave Wal-Mart a waiver because they had a formal policy on the books against gender discrimination.  Essentially, if the policy is there, the corporation cannot be held accountable for what middle management in far away places is doing, even if it is reoccurring pattern.

Now, I’m not a lawyer but as someone who worked on a Supreme Court case with the primary duty of bringing diet coke to my boss who delivered an oral argument, I can tell you this looks like a loophole in the making.  It really reminds me of the idea of “too big to fail.”  It’s as if it’s “too big to control.”

Strangely enough, the decision has almost nothing to do with discrimination.  The case became a vehicle for deciphering the details of class action law, and how to classify these 1.5 million women.  The classification made was apparently incorrect in the eyes of the Court. Even the almighty Ginsburg concedes this.

What Ginsburg highlights though is the lack of mention of discrimination in the majority opinion, the failure of the Court to give so much as a sentence of “credence” to this original issue.  Instead the court goes into the minutiae of Rule 23(b)(3).  This I leave to the lawyers to contend with.

The one legal issue from the decision that I do want to address is commonality.  Commonality is defined as, “the existence of a class of persons who have suffered the same injury.”  There are legal semantics here, which to be clear I am not examining, but the idea of women as a whole being defined by this conception of suffering common injury is extremely compelling.

As someone who thinks a lot about the meaning of gender, and if it even truly exists, it is often difficult to put a finger on what makes a woman a woman.  And this conception of shared injury may very well be it.  If gender is a social construction, it is what society makes of a woman that makes her one.  So in essence the discrimination one faces based on her presentation as a woman, makes her a woman. Not to say that discrimination itself is essential to womanhood.  I have high hopes for society changing and defining women through virtues and equality.  When this will happen I can’t be sure, but even on a day like today I believe it.  If only because the woman who started the ACLU women’s rights project is sitting on that bench telling Scalia what’s up.

Every Saturday I wander my way to Union Square to see a lady with a mohawk to move among her garbage cans and worms and dump my frozen compost.  This particular Saturday, the copious April showers forced my adventure there subterranean.  Sitting on the subway with a clear plastic bag of rotting fruit and vegetables, I began to notice my car mates staring and sniffing.  At some point it became a challenge to see how many people would look, would anyone say anything?  Would they scoot away to escape the smell?  To not be associated with the trash girl?

Well, as much as pride myself on my little social experiment I was topped this week by a brave young woman who subjected herself to such a trial for six months.  She sacrificed much of her senior year to her mission.  Lying to even her best friend for what she believed would be a greater good.  At 17, that alone is no easy feat.  But what she lied about makes it all the more complicated: she faked a pregnancy.

Now in her words she, was “fighting against those stereotypes and rumors because the reality is I’m not pregnant.”  By “those  stereotypes” she referred to the nasty things her peers had said about her in the six months prior at school, before they knew she was not truly pregnant.

But a reproductive justice frame—well that tells a different story.  The media attention and stigma around pregnant teens is very powerful, unless you happen to be on Teen Mom.  National media is, perhaps, the most powerful advocacy tool we have.  But what was the message transmitted here?  Everything’s okay because she’s not pregnant?  She was an A-student so she couldn’t have really been pregnant, it’s only those dumb people who go around having babies “too young.”  You should lie to your partner’s family about pregnancy?  Lie to your siblings?  Lie to your best friend?

At 17, I was barely aware of anything besides an overwhelming urge to leave the burbs and spread my wings.  There was no way I would have had the forethought or persistence to pursue any cause, let alone commit myself to something so time intensive.  For that I give Ms. Gaby Rodriguez all the credit in the world.  She is very brave, and I have no doubt will go far.   But I think by accident she may have propagated her own shame game when she said, “I’m not planning to have a child until after I graduate.”

Unto itself it is a fine decision, and in a lot of cases logical.  But after all that effort to support young pregnant women I would have hoped that one of the two quotes she gave wasn’t othering herself from the women she was so eager to fight for.  It would be simple to blame the media, and it may be true.  But then you return to the question of the advocacy message being projected.  Most of the articles I saw ended on this note that she wouldn’t be breeding for years, with the implication that’s the happy ending.  Bright young girl survives social experiment to not have babies.

With that we return to trash girl.  Now that shame game had few consequences beyond my blushing.  No media attention, no lies, no wider motivation.  Simply an interest in human reaction.  What I pose to you is tomorrow (or perhaps the next day) prompting your own shame game.  Ideally it would be reproductively related.  I recommend whipping your birth control on the subway, flaunting tampons on the trip from your desk to the bathroom, or perhaps even * gasp * pulling a condom out of your purse in a bar.  See who looks, see who doesn’t, and let us know.

At a conference at the New School with a wide-ranging consortium of humanist scholars it seemed safe to assume Body and State: How the State Controls and Protests the Body was going to lead to a conversation I heard before.  Down with the political patriarchy!  Up with reproductive freedom!  But it was anything but.

Sure there was an almost cliché lecture on the media and the globalization of Western body image but there was also discussion of prisoners as experimental soldiers and the first English translation of the Karma Sutra.   The body was examined at its most expansive, and that brought me to a new more expansive view of reproductive justice.  Oddly enough it was the lectures around death and the dead which made me reconsider the frame of how, when and if a woman brings life into the world.

The indeterminate moment of death mirrors that of life.  Though there are evolving medical nuances for aspects of both, death is much more complicated than I ever took the time to think about.

(more…)

As a native New Yorker I have the pleasure of hosting my childhood friends every Christmas during their semi-annual pilgrimage back to the mother country. Sitting at dinner with my pack last night, I divulged my fears of finding a job upon graduating.  Leading to a very familiar debate: you can either have money and no life or a life and no money.

Now, I have always seen myself as a life and no money sort of girl but yesterday was the first time I saw my friends as the former.  Here I was sitting amongst a corporate recruiter, a former consultant in grad school, and a biomedical hopeful with the very degree I am about to finish—yet this was the first moment they appeared as such and not solely the girls who first convinced me to believe in myself.

Could it be that I am the last of the starry eyed dreamers?  Perhaps I have been so lost in a bubble of reproductive justice that I can no longer relate to the world I want to change?

Even before the impetus of my job search it ‘s become tiresome explaining what I want to do and that there is no funding to do it so odds are I will wait out the recession fighting to end obesity or breast cancer.  Not that they are unworthy causes.  They’re just not MY cause.

Do I even have a right to be so picky?  Why do I feel this bizarre ownership?

Maybe the question is not money or time but simply vision versus blinders?  Have my blinders been up so long I can no longer see that there is nobility in all of these life choices.  That even if I got my dream job there would be give and take.   That the value in “going corporate” to help fund the causes you care about most can be even more effective than working in the field.

Leaving my options open seems the safest way to go personally but if we all did that where does that leave reproductive justice, standing still or coasting along just the same?

Cops and robbers may never get old, but robbers and robbers are just more fun.    In Boardwalk Empire’s prohibition-era Atlantic City our robbers against robbers come in all forms: politicians, bootleggers, showgirls, mafiosos, and murderers.  And perhaps the mightiest robber of them all, the whore.

Whore is defined as:

• “A prostitute”
• “A person considered sexually promiscuous.”
• “To associate or have sexual relations with prostitutes or a prostitute.”
• And my personal favorite, “To compromise one’s principles for personal gain.”

Any of the characters could fall within these confines.  Why were only the women on the show branded with such a title?

Without devolving into my own series of jaded feminist clichés, I turned to a dear friend who, as luck would have it, starred as a show girl in none other than Boardwalk Empire.

1) Do you consider your character a whore?  And why?

Not necessarily: When I was playing my character, I never felt like a prostitute.  In my mind, the role of a showgirl was more of a performance art than a sex act.  Showgirls represented idealized beauty – not just sex objects. In our first episode, the showgirls’ presentation was partly inspired by Renaissance paintings—I remember being shown a picture of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In fact, because we were wearing so little, we were told to not move during our ‘performance’ because that would be considered vulgar to our 1920s audience; instead we pretended to be Roman statues.

Showgirls were expected to have a degree of class and self-respect on the job.  They may even represent an idealized sexual fantasy of sorts, but that is where their job ends.  Additionally, the costumes and headdresses were so elaborate, with wigs and heavy makeup, that it made it easy to keep the showgirl persona separate from who the character was off-duty. I feel that my character could keep her job as a showgirl and her principles – as long as she left her performance on the stage.  Some showgirls did, some did not.

(more…)