Abortion Gang

This time of year, my life is cluttered with dispatches de la surreal. This email reports that a fetus is testifying in a committee in Ohio’s state legislature. That tweet says Mississippi is going to prosecute women for miscarrying and this next one is asking me to speak out against making it legal to kill abortion providers (??!!!). And, to borrow from the great Nina Simone, everybody knows about South Dakota, goddam!

Besides drinking barrels of whiskey, what’s a pro-choice activist to do while the extremists do their springtime waltz? I don’t claim to have all the answers – and would love your suggestions in the comments – but here are a couple ideas to keep up the fight and keep it together until the elected misfits slink back to their small town law firms:

Bowl for Choice. We, and the anti-choice factions, know all too well that a legal right to abortion is meaningless unless all women can access abortion care. Enter National Network of Abortion Funds, which works with organizations across the country to provide money to women who need abortions but would otherwise not be able to afford them. The Second Annual National Abortion Access Bowl-athon is rules the month of April when pro-choice activists in 25 cities will be hitting the lanes for reproductive justice. Start your own team or give to an individual bowler – like me or our blog mistress Steph or our friend @ClinicEscort, who has vowed to tattoo #prochoice (the Twitter hashtag for abortion rights news and activism) on her body if she raises $3000 for the Women’s Medical Fund.

Take the fight to the Feds. Sometimes I feel like my home state of Texas is in a battle with other states to see who can hurt women more  – and is winning because of the huge conservative majority there. That’s when I turn my activism back to the federal level where we have an extremely hostile, anti-choice Congress but some hope because of the (theoretically) pro-choice Senate and White House. Turns out the GOP is making redefining rape, allowing hospitals to let women die, and auditing women who’ve had abortions, a top priority this session. This can only mean it’s time for us to take up the banner on the national level. Sign this petition to stop the IRS from forcing women who’ve had abortions to recount their reasons to IRS agents and, if you can make it to DC, join NARAL for a national lobby day on April 7^th.

Stop fake clinics in their tracks. Austin, Baltimore, and New York City have all passed groundbreaking legislation that requires crisis pregnancy centers – ideologically driven establishments that pose as health clinics to lie and shame women out of having abortions – to post notice that they do not have medical personnel on staff and do not provide abortion services or referrals to clinics that provide these services. Start a petition on Change.org to lobby your city council to introduce this legislation in your city. If you’re in college, join the Feminist Majority campaign to expose fake clinics and get them and their advertisements off campus.

Become a clinic escort. On any given day in the United States, women and men go to reproductive health clinics to get birth control, get tested for sexually transmitted infections and, yes, have abortions. And on any given day there are people who stand outside to scream threats at these people for making the choices that are best for them at the time. Clinic escorts bravely stand between the patients and the screamers, using their bodies to shield the patients and their voices to let them know someone is on their side. Go here to find out how to get training to become one of these pro-choice heroes.

Start a freakin’ riot. 1 in 3 US women will have an abortion. And despite what you may have heard, more than half the country supports abortion rights. So let’s be LOUD and PROUD about being pro-choice. Planned Parenthood has launched a bus Truth Tour to rally support in communities across the country – check here to see if the big pink bus is rolling into your town.

Prepare to run. For office, of course! EMILY’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice people to all levels of government, is training candidates to run and supporting them with the funds to win. If you can’t attend one of their trainings, try The White House Project, which prepares women to take the elective reigns. Remember, change starts at the local level and some city council elections are won by under a hundred votes. If you don’t think you’re a candidate, look at some of the buffoons who are serving right now!

Here’s a toast to the pro-choice majority out there fighting the good fight all year round. Sling one back in “honor” of all the extremist cocks puffing their feathers in state capitals across the country and then let’s get back to work!

Ever since reading feminist techie extraordinaire Deanna Zandt’s fantastic book Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, I’ve been thinking about the nature of pro-choice activism on social networking sites like Twitter and how it fits into the larger framework of the reproductive justice movement. Zandt’s thesis, with which I heartily agree, is that social networks are revamping both the definition of authority and the nature of power and if we want to be involved in both we have to be out, in force, on these sites.

Out in force, I am. I tweet, a lot, and I follow almost 2000 others who also tweet about feminism, reproductive justice, and politics. One of the most lively and informative streams to follow are those tweets with the #prochoice hashtag – a twitter tradition that marks a tweet as about a certain topic and part of a larger conversation. As in on-the-ground organizing, there are a variety of styles of doing pro-choice activism on Twitter and each one contributes differently to the goal of making abortion safe, legal, and available to all women everywhere.

The Debaters: As in the offline world, anti-choice people are the minority online but make significantly more noise than those who think bodily autonomy is a basic human right. These squeaky wheels also spew the same lies about abortion as their offline counterparts, functioning for the sole purpose of making women scared of and ashamed about abortion. Also as in “real” life, there are a collection of brave pro-choice souls on Twitter who take on these people and their ridiculous arguments head on, day after day, calling out the misinformation, misogyny and hypocrisy. I laughed out loud the other day when @ProChoiceGal noted that being “brown/Arabic” and pro-choice defies the limited, bigoted logic of her anti-choice sparring partners. Abortion Gang contributor @KushielsMoon also makes quick, witty work of the deluge of anti’s who think “baby killer” is an original or effective epithet. These Twitterers do the necessary work of getting into the trenches with the enemy to expose them and surely change undecided minds by dishing out facts in a rational, respectful manner. They serve to remind everyone, women who’ve chosen abortion especially, that there are allies out there who respect and honor their choices. (more…)

There are days as a pro-choice activist that I close my computer, go sit down on my bed, and cry.

Truth be told, there’s nothing the anti-abortion movement can do that really surprises me after eight years of doing this work. I know how it feels to have “baby killer”  screamed menacingly from across the parking lot and to wade through protesters with gruesome signs to give a speech about sex education. I know what it’s like to hide my trembling hands in my pockets and look calm and resolute for the cameras as I evacuate a pro-choice meeting because of a bomb threat. I’ll never forget what it’s like to cry with a room of advocates, gathered to celebrate a woman’s lifetime of service to the movement, after learning that yet another doctor had been gunned down for trusting women.

I know the more political ins and outs, too. I know that after the anti-abortion movement figured out that America really is a pro-choice nation and it would be harder than they thought to overturn Roe, they turned to chipping away at access state by state. TRAP laws. Parental notification and 24-hour waiting periods. Legislating the denial of access to reproductive health services for poor and military and Native women. The list goes on and on.

So no, I’m never surprised anymore. But that doesn’t mean that each and every time, it doesn’t make me overwhelmingly, incredibly sad.

The particular instance that set off the waterworks recently was hearing that Louisiana became the 13^th state to pass a law mandating ultrasounds before abortions – paid for by the woman. This one stipulates the ultrasound must be performed even in cases of rape.
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On Tuesday, Double XX editor Jessica Grose posted a misguided, finger-wagging analysis of the recent Reclaiming Virginity conference held at Harvard, at which I spoke on a panel.

As Jessica Valenti noted, via Twitter, Ms. Grose took in the Rethinking Virginity conference as “lady bloggers rethinking their slutty ways.” Grose spends most of her post laying out conference organizer Lena Chen’s past as a sex blogger, including the slut-shaming she endured at the hands of fellow students and print and online publications. It’s obvious she views Chen’s decision to give up her blog (for the moment) and identify herself as a “Third Wave Marxist feminist” as a defection to what she describes as ‘Generation Scold’ – “deeply conventional and traditional” millenials determined to stamp out sexual promiscuity.

In what I can only call a lapse in journalistic ethics, Jessica Grose leaves out both the actual and political context in which the Rethinking Virginity conference occurred. In service of her completely off-base attack on the generation directly before her own, she leads the reader to believe that Lena Chen pulled the money out of Harvard to have a day-long conference – including speakers from other cities, programs, food, etc – to absolve herself of her past and warn other young women of the dangers of sex. Nowhere does she mention that Harvard has become the newest hotbed of abstinence-only-until-marriage activism in the form of a group called True Love Revolution, which has made headlines for, amongst other things, condemning gay sex as a sin and calling on GLBQ students to remain celibate for life to avoid the fires of hell.
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Aw, it’s always nice to get some “love” from Jill Stanek and her crew. (Note: Ms. Stanek’s staff has shockingly bowed to reality and put Steph as the rightful founder of the blog. However, I think they chose to quote me for a reason, explained in the response below.)

Quote of the Day 3-31-10

Calling ourselves an Abortion gang means that we are committed to destigmatizing not only abortion care work but also reproductive justice activism. We are dedicated to showing that young men and women care about our bodies, health, and rights. We won’t take anti-choice bull**** no matter how many different ways they spew it.

..I hope that you’ll let us challenge you and that you’ll respect us enough to do the same..

~ Shelby Knox, “self proclaimed Christian” and creator of The Abortion Gang, March 31

The only problem: I didn’t start the blog. It would have taken one minute for Ms. Stanek and staff to do the research to find that out. But as per the anti-choice playbook, facts are casualties to one of several predetermined narratives, this one being that “real” Christians believe forced pregnancy is next to Godliness.
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