Abortion Gang

If you’re a twitter user you know that it allows organizations to buy promoted tweet space, wherein a tweet of that organization’s choice is put onto a network of users’ feed and marked as “promoted.” Usually, you’ll see a brand like a Coca Cola promote a tweet with a link to an external site that, naturally, promotes their product. The concept is pretty straight forward.

This morning, a link to a promoted tweet made it into my time line that caught my attention. Here’s the tweet (trigger warning: violence, racism. H/T to @TheAngryFangirl for the screengrab). CNSNews is the company that paid for the promoted tweet, a Christian news organization that produces and posts anti-choice material. The tweet contains wildly misleading and inaccurate information and its violent language is triggering.

Does Twitter have standards or do they just take money from anyone? Should Twitter have standards, and what should they be?

Yes, Twitter should have some basic standards.The racist nature of the tweet should have disqualified it at the outset. If that didn’t ring some alarm bells, they should not promote patently false information that is deceptive and misleading. Basic decency asks why no one considered the tweet to be inappropriate or offensive.

I started a petition on Change.org asking Twitter to remove the offensive promoted tweet and update its promoted tweet policy to disallow racist content. Please sign and pass along.

Earlier this year, I stepped away from the reproductive justice blogosphere. I wasn’t overwhelmed or busy; instead I felt bored. I felt as if I had been repeating the same conversations over and over, while getting nowhere. I wasn’t dismayed about the future of abortion rights so much as ambivalent.  I figured I would step away, take a break, and find my enthusiasm. I figured reproductive justice could wait for me.

While on my break, my local newspaper posted an anti-choice opinion piece on the horrors of Gosnell. It went something along the lines of “why isn’t mainstream media talking about this” and “we need to stop abortion now.”  I shook my head, but didn’t do anything about it. I just closed the newspaper.

Another day, I came across a post on another message board I frequent where a user said that seeing a woman breastfeed in public made them uncomfortable, and that women should cover up so that the user wasn’t distracted while eating her dinner. I sighed and closed the thread.

Seeing these two different reproductive justice topics outside of my RJ blogosphere got me thinking, though. The conversation doesn’t stop when I choose to step away–it just loses my voice. And not just any voice for reproductive justice, but MY voice. But that’s not the only thing I realized. I also realized that the RJ discussion doesn’t just happen in the blogosphere, on our pro-choice blogs and twitter hashtags. It happens in everyday conversations, among people who don’t spend their every day engrossed in a battle for our rights.  I don’t need to dedicate every waking hour of my time to pushing for reproductive justice; I can instead go about my daily life and find small conversations or local articles to reply to.

But I’m not the only one who can do this. It can be tough and draining to dedicate your career or all your volunteer time to reproductive justice (technically, it can be tough and draining to dedicate all your time to any one subject).  And while it is essential that we have those 24/7 dedicated people, reproductive justice still needs the “now and again” people. The people who care, but don’t spend their days writing blog posts and tweeting. We need to get our information out into the greater world to the people who may not even know of the term reproductive justice. We need our friends, our siblings, our parents to not just see our dedication but also understand where we come from.

So if your co-worker mentions state funding for abortion, take three minutes to give them a reply. If you see an article in the local paper about TRAP laws, take five minutes to write an email and send it. If you come across a Bowl-a-Thon page, share it on your social media pages. Then go about your day, and realize you’ve done a ton of good for the reproductive justice movement.

This fall I’m entering a Master of Social Work program, stepping down from my job in reproductive health, and stepping back from other reproductive justice activities. With this transition comes some sadness about being removed from reproductive health, rights, and justice circles and people who have become my allies and friends. The people who I have met over the past few years have provided constant inspiration and support and have challenged me to become a better activist and person. Not engaging with them or the issues I’m passionate about on a daily basis makes me feel like I’m losing something important.

But why do I feel this way, and why does it feel so different from the other transitions I’ve undergone thus far? Maybe it’s because I’m 25 and any life transition is going to feel this way. Or maybe it’s because I am so passionate about abortion access and reproductive justice that taking a break from that feels especially unsettling.

Maybe it’s that the next part of my life is uncertain, and that I’m not sure how reproductive justice activism will fit into it.

If I’m not actively doing activist work, does that mean that I am no longer an activist? What does being an activist even mean? I don’t envision myself as a person who will stop talking, writing, or making art about abortion rights or health care access, but maybe I will. Maybe I will take steps back as I grow older. Maybe I will spend time planning my wedding, learning, and having new experiences.

My hope however, is that no one like me will stop being a reproductive justice activist. Not until we live in a different world where everyone has the ability to plan and space their pregnancies and parent with means, support, and dignity.

That’s why I have all of you, my online Abortion Gang community. No matter what else I’m doing in my daily life, I have this community to speak and engage with, to feel connected to, and to talk about the issues that we care about. And as a social worker, I am going to be doing justice-oriented work that matters. It might not be what I’m doing now, but it will be something that will make a difference.

The next few years will bring challenges and growth, and that must be what life and activism are about. My work will become more intersectional and I will have another frame to see things. I will bring social work to my activism and activism to my social work. I will find new things that I want to do and new communities to be a part of. I will blog more, but I won’t give up talking or fighting. I will make mistakes. I will discover what it means to care so much, although I may never figure it out completely. And I will find a new ways to dedicate my heart to my work.

Like Erin, for the past several weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, as feminists and reproductive health, rights, and justice activists engage in radical self-care practices.

As a young working professional who recently graduated from college, I’ve been thinking of ways to get reconnected to the self-care practices I engaged in as a college student. All too often we, as activists, say “yes” when we truly need a break and walk daily with the emotional stressors of activist work bearing on our shoulders. My work as an activist, organizer, and educator is directly tied to ME, my body, my identity, but can oftentimes lend itself to burnout. Thus, I’ve come up with some tips for us young activsts (and activists of any other age) to practice self-care while remaining true to our values:

1. Learn to say “No”
Learning to say no is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a form of self-love. I’m sure there are tons of us out there who love to say yes and, oftentimes, in doing so bite off a lot more than we can chew. Let’s learn to say “no,” so that when we do say “yes” we are bringing our best selves to that task.

2. Feed Your Soul
When I say “feed your soul” I don’t only mean feed your soul with soothing music and journaling. Feed your soul with nourishing foods that do well by you and by your body. Feed your soul with intellectual conversations and with relationships that build you up, not break you down.

3. Get In Touch With Your Inner Child
The inner child in you is still alive, you just have to coax it out (if you don’t already). The inner child in you would want your adult self to have some fun. Go play tag with your significant other or friends. Jump on your bed just because you can. Color a picture in a coloring book!

4. Feed Your Creative Energy
I recently read a quote that said, “just because you can’t dance well, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.” Dance if you feel like it! If you can’t paint, go paint a picture anyway, just for the hell of it! Go outside and take a picture of nature…or take a picture of yourself at weird Myspace angles. JUST DO IT.

5. Clear your life of clutter
I’m guilty of it–physical clutter, emotional clutter, all of it. Look, if it’s not sentimental to you, you’re not going to use it, or you don’t care for it, regift that shit! If you’re holding onto things that remind you of a painful time in your life, let it go and let go of that emotional clutter and pain.

6. Savor the Moment
Savor the moment in your relationships, friendships, and hobbies. In one moment, savor that time and focus your energy and thinking on it and nothing else.

7. Continue creating change
As activists, we inherently practice self-care as we work to heal our communities from external stressors and toxic factors. Continue to do your activist work so that, through healing your community, you heal yourself.

These are my my thoughts on how to engage in self-care as a radical activist. How do you, as activists, maintain your sanity through radical self-care?

Structurally, almost every movement, organization, company, and individual is facing precisely the set of challenges the media continues to insist are “tearing apart” “the movement.” Just this morning the Morning Joe round-table, featuring the editor of Forbes Magazine discussing the front-page feature on “30 Under 30,” confronted this very issue, discussing the advantages those under 30 have in their familiarity with new technology. New technology and the internet, which even those of us under 30 but over 20 have a different relationship with than forthcoming generations, has changed the game in every way, on every level. Companies and organizations willing to evolve and take these new mediums seriously will succeed; the ones that aren’t will fail, or fall seriously behind. Across the board, people who spent decades working their way up the ladder resent “millenials” for swooping in and changing the game, their only “experience” that they were raised with and have an innate understanding of new communications mediums with which people a decade or two older struggle. This resentment is fair, understandable, and completely useless.

Because the white, straight, cis, economically advantaged women who head the pro-choice and feminist movement mainstream mainstays are the media’s go-tos, they have been allowed to frame the narrative of this “struggle.” That framework – the story that “millenials” are difficult, spoiled, absentee – has done greater damage than the reality of it could ever have done. In the unsettled years between 1990-2005, the mainstream pro-choice movement had the opportunity to get excited about emergent forms of communication, to embrace young people’s enthusiasm and integrate them, their work ethic, and most vitally, their very different attitudes about race, sexuality, sexual orientation, gender, and class structures into “the movement,” potentially creating, in its place, an actual, inclusive, very real movement which at present most of us would be on the inside of, rather than the outside. Instead, second-wave feminists bunkered down with their beliefs and ideas about what structures were best and necessary for the survival of their limited pro-choice goals. Some mostly white, mostly straight, mostly economically advantaged third-wavers joined them and were recognized and promoted above their peers. And forth-wavers – activists working within the reproductive justice framework and including people of many generations who were left out of “the movement” for decades – have joined forces to work outside of the system, where, frankly, shit is getting done.

“The movement” is a mess because its leaders were short-sighted. This is a shame. The fundraising structures they have in place, their decades of experience, their collective power would all be great assets to those of us coming up. But they aren’t comfortable sharing those things with a new movement they don’t recognize because they obstinately refused to look it in the eye for the almost four decades since the Hyde Amendment it spent gaining speed. You can’t turn your back on the ocean and be pissed off when a wave pulls you under, come up sputtering and tell a reporter that nature just won’t cooperate with you.

Instead of perpetuating the myth the young people are fracturing pro-choice movement, we’d like to see less lazy journalism and more investigation into stories that really matter. To make this easier for reporters, we’ve compiled some ideas:

• What are the differences between the pro-choice framework and the reproductive justice framework and how do they impact every day activism?
• Why are there so few people of color in visible leadership positions in the pro-choice movement?
• Why are the leaders of NARAL, NOW, etc the “go-to” media spokespeople for our movement, and how can we change that?
• Is there intergenerational tension in other social justice movements? What does this look like? How is it experienced by everyone, including people in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond?
• How are people working outside established feminist and pro-choice legacy organizations to create change? How do people who work outside organizations make ends meet? What is their vision for social change?
• How are the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements funded? How do they differ in how they spend  money? Are they invested in sustainability in ways that are different or similar to the pro-choice movement?

Enough with journalists pitting us against each other. Let’s start asking the questions that matter.

Of course you’ve heard about Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. But have you heard about Giving Tuesday?#GivingTuesday is a new idea that allows people to give back to those in need this holiday season. Did you save a bunch of money by shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? How about making a huge difference in the lives of those in need, and passing on some of your savings?

Here at AbortionGang, we know of a lot of organizations that are in need of donations. Unfortunately, we can’t list them all- but we will list some below, in case you’re not sure who you can give to (orgs are listed in alphabetical order, and are all equally worthy of your donations!)

Backline  - A toll free talk line for those who need to talk about pregnancy, parenting, adoption or abortion.
Canadian Federation for Sexual Health - An org working to improve access to reproductive healthcare, especially for youth.
Canadians for Choice - An organization that researches and advocates for reproductive health.
DC Abortion Fund - A great abortion fund, this link will take you to their Holiday Event page, where you can buy tickets or just make a donation if you don’t live in the area.
Ibis - A research organization that looks into all types of reproductive health and justice issues.
Ipas - an organization that works internationally to make abortion safe and accessible.
Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy - an organization that works to prevent unplanned teen pregnancies, and also support and empower teen parents.
National Network of Abortion Funds - want to give to an Abortion Fund, but not sure where the biggest need is? Give to the national org!
New York Abortion Access Fund - Sandy interrupted the lives of New Yorkers in so many ways- including doctors appointments. Can you help the NYAAF out?
Patherfinder International - another great organization that spreads family planing access internationally.
PEI Reproductive Rights Organization - Want to give in Canada? Here’s an abortion fund in Canada.
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice - a faith based group that empowers people of faith to speak out in support of Reproductive Justice.

Where are you giving today? Leave suggestions (and links!) in the comments.

My 62-year-old aunt is very politically aware. During the weekend she stayed with me (the last weekend before the election) she checked Nate Silver’s blog eight times and crowed each time his predictor nudged close to Obama. In 2003 she marched to stop the Iraq war and in January 2009 flew out to DC to be a part of Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Then I decided to quiz my aunt about other abortion-related issues. Crisis Pregnancy Centers? She took a guess: were they medical centers for difficult pregnancies? TRAP laws? She hadn’t heard the term, but when I started describing the ways states (like my home state of Virginia) were using state regulations to force all the clinics to close I could see she got the idea. Then I asked her what she knew about clinic escorts and I saw she thought it was something that had happened in the 80s and maybe the 90s but wasn’t aware they are still out every Saturday in cities across the country.

To be fair to my aunt, those of us who work in these issues live and breathe this stuff every day. I quizzed her not because I thought she would know every detail but because I wanted to see how wide-spread some of the concepts are. It was clear that she’d heard about the issues that made the national news. She knew about transvaginal ultrasounds and the controversy this election season regarding all the GOP politicians who said wild things about rape.

I would bet all of my relatives (all ardent Pro-Choice voting Democrats) would have about the same level of knowledge. My father told me that the most animated my mother (age 67) got watching the Democratic National Convention was during Sandra Fluke’s speech.

Many reproductive rights activists have written about having family members who don’t support Choice. But in my family everyone supports legal abortion and wide access to contraception (this may have something to do with the fact we’re Jewish). If I probed a little deeper I’m sure I’d get some responses that would sound like an anti-Choice view, (I’m sure I’ve heard relatives something along the lines of “I support Choice but I think third-trimester abortions are wrong…”) but no one even in even my extended family would ever vote for any initiative, amendment, or candidate to limit abortion access. And if it was a family member who needed that third-trimester abortion all of them would be supportive.

My family is comprised of “undecided voters” who don’t follow politics. They might not all live and breathe the minutia, but most read articles about the election, watch the debates, and generally knew who they would vote for before the primary was over (or before it started). Millions of Pro-Choice voters are just like my family. They’re not “low-information” voters, but they maybe “low-information” when it comes to reproductive rights issues.

Only when reproductive rights raise to a certain level of notoriety do these type of voters become aware. What’s level does it have to rise to catch their attention? It means making the 6 pm news repeatedly, be discussed on the front page of the local paper, and it doesn’t hurt to also be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. When they hear about anti-Choice idiocy, (such as the Todd Akin’s statement) it engages them. But for the wider populace to become aware of “news” it has to be utterly ubiquitous — repeated ad nausea for weeks on end by talk show hosts and newspaper columnists.

The silver lining to Anti-Choice politicians is this election is there was a never-ending stream of nationally embarrassing remarks that made the national news, which then trickled down to electorate. But after the election all my relatives (and millions like them) will go back to an inert political state on reproductive justice, only to come out for the next election in 2014.

The Center for Reproductive Rights this week announced a new campaign they are running called Draw the Line. The campaign shows us a number of headlines (including “Woman Arrested for Using Birth Control,” “The Last Abortion Clinic,” and “Roe v Wade Overturned”) that could soon become reality if the current trend in anti-choice legislation continues. In the end, it asks readers to sign the Bill of Reproductive Rights, which has three main components:

1)      The right to make our own decisions about our reproductive health and future, free from intrusion or coercion by any government, group or individual.

2)      The right to a full range of safe, affordable, and readily accessible reproductive healthcare, including pregnancy care, preventive services, contraception, abortion, and fertility treatment, and accurate information about all of the above.

3)      The right to be free from discrimination in access to reproductive healthcare or on the basis of our reproductive decisions.

These are extremely fundamental and important rights. In deciding to create this campaign, Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Mother Jones, ”We knew it was time to not only continue defending in the courts, but to begin a very aggressive campaign with a clear articulation of what it is that we are seeking to establish.” In other words, this is not to replace the hard work being done across the states to stop current anti-choice legislation, but it is a way for people across the movement to come together and take a stand for the future.

After signing the Bill of Reproductive Rights, I decided to take a stand of my own, and draw a line in my conversations on Twitter. In the past, I’ve tried to inform antichoicers why abortion would still be legal even if a fetus was considered a person. Our rights do not allow us to use the body of another human being without their consent–if a woman didn’t want to be pregnant, she could still end the pregnancy. However, I’ve found that the most common response I get is for the anti-choicer to start questioning my humanity, by calling me cruel and claiming I have no heart. Since this tactic is obviously getting me nowhere, I’ve decided to draw a line and stop letting anti-choicers control the conversation. I will no longer let their assumption about fetal personhood into the conversation. This is one way I can work towards a world where language is led by reproductive justice advocates.

So how will you take a stand? Will you sign the Bill of Reproductive Rights? Will you call your local legislator and tell them to support abortion rights? Will you make a donation to a local Abortion Fund? Will you do all these things and more? Let us know in the comments if you’ve learned of other ways we can Draw the Line and take a stand against anti-choice attacks!

This week at the Abortion Gang

Empowering Birth Awareness Week| An Open Letter To Nancy Keenan | Candies Foundation , You Are Doing It Wrong The Trouble With Privilege | International Reproductive Rights Roundup  | I Know Women That Are Glad They Had An Abortion 

Abortion and Politics 
The DNC has all the women folk speaking! Which is amazing, but not quite good enough. Where were the women of color on prime time beside Michelle Obama? This was  is my own critique of the DNC that trotted out women like Sandra Fluke to speak to or on behalf of all women. Sorry, Fluke doesn’t stand for me. But her message to people in the USA is what needs to be said out loud, on prime time, over, and over, and over again.

Michelle Obama’s message to voters of color. 

Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren talked about hate, privilege, and poverty.

As Steph Herold noted on twitter last night, there were many signs at the convention asking for middle class equality, but what of the poor and very poor?

In sharp contrast to the last few days, the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week got under way with nary a mention of war or poverty, and managed to completely avoiding any information about Romney’s policy’s, taxes, and George W. Bush. Also, the RNC decided to officially make hardline, extreme anti-choice policies the central part of their nomination shindig.

Last week, Republican delegates from around the country approved the anti-abortion platform, and even though Romney is trying to distance himself from the unpopular embryos-are-more-important-than-women stance, his campaign approved the platform and the delegates voted the extreme anti-choice stance as the official party position.

Rick Santorum and Abortion, gross. 

From the LA Times: Does Ann Romney Really Know What Women Are Going Through? She spoke only to mothers, essentially removing women and people without children from the conversation. So, my guess is, no, she doesn’t know what women are going through. She totally transparently tried to cash in on the so -called “mommy wars.” She said, “YOU are the hope for America.” To all other women? Fuck off.

What we didn’t hear but understood immediately, is that Mrs. Romney’s speech essentially relegated all women that are not mothers by choice, don’t like/want/need monogamous partnership, are gay, lesbian, queer, trans*, questioning, who cannot have children, who do not want children, and/or basically any women without a kid are not important and in fact, are second class citizens. That’s my take, and I am not alone.  

In Colorado, ‘No Personhood’ campaign gets off the ground. 

Ann Friedman writes for New York Magazine about the ‘Penis Game’ in American politics. 

The long game on this is pretty bleak. Once the election is over, no matter who wins the presidency, reproductive rights battles will be fought over a couple of paragraphs affixed to a budget bill and other arcane legislative tidbits. Or in state-level legislation in places like North Dakota or Mississippi, which makes it hard to convince all women, nationwide, that their rights are at risk. It’s then that truly pro-choice Americans — those of us who’d rather let individual women decide which circumstances necessitate abortion — will cry foul. We’ll feel sold out. This isn’t why we voted for Democrats, we’ll protest. But we will have helped set the stage for this, each time we shared a crazy GOP abortion quote without trying to broaden the conversation beyond unwanted pregnancies that result from rape. Each time we shouted these men’s words back at them, instead of amplifying information on policies that directly affect women.

First Person Experiences and Abortion 

The better healthcare a person has, the less likely they are to have an abortion.

A school in Louisiana is forcing female students to take pregnancy tests- a gross violation of human rights.

A guest post from two anonymous feminist organizers. 

As young feminists, activists, and radicals, making the transition from college to the “real” working world has been tough. Like many young people, we have been schooled in the writings of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, made campus activism a part of our daily lives, and have expected to enter a world in which we would continue to fight injustice, instigate change, and make our voices heard.

However, as interns at a large mainstream feminist non-profit,  we realized that there were a surprising number of obstacles standing our way. The place we worked at may have lauded itself on being a “feminist” organization mobilizing young people for social justice, but so many things we noticed or experienced on a daily basis as interns contradicted this ideal. We realized that young people were valued as an “image” – a pretty picture to put on a brochure or the organization’s website – but their independent voices, their insights, and their unique experiences were not acknowledged internally. Sometimes colleagues patronized us when we voiced critiques. Sometimes we were told our comments were “inappropriate” when we spoke up. Other times we were escorted out of the building. Supervisors appreciated interns who complicitly and obediently did what was asked of them, and these were the people whose faces would later appear on the website, the faces of the promising next generation. But our voices were ignored and silenced.

Like many people new to the non-profit world, we discovered that what we thought would be working at the forefront of a social movement actually felt like working for a business. The young people who had the potential to make a difference were the ones being monitored and sometimes even punished in the name of protecting the business brand. This was when we started wondering – how can our social movements be successful if they shut down our voices along with opportunities for change? We needed a space to share our frustrations, and know that we were not alone in wanting to see that change happen. We had a lot to say, and didn’t know where to say it or who to tell.

Interns Speak Out is our attempt to create that space. Essentially, it’s a blog created by and for interns in the non-profit world, a space for them to share their stories of empowerment as well as stories of disillusionment. Because the voices of young people need to be heard and respected, not silenced or ignored. Because social movements can’t thrive if non-profits control and monitor our criticisms. Because too often our creative energy is stifled by mindless tasks. Because our labor is valuable and we deserve to be paid living wages. Because our social justice movements cannot be sustainable if organizations are internally rife with hierarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, and other forms of marginalization. Because our thoughts, opinions, insights, and wisdom are critical to non-profit organizations and we need a space to share them.

We want to hear the stories that aren’t being told. We want to hear from those that aren’t the bright-eyed faces on home pages, on glossy brochures, or on TV. We want to hear from the young voices that were so powerful that they were considered “threatening.”  We want to hear from you.

Have an intern story to share? Submit at internsspeakout.tumblr.com/submit.