Abortion Gang

Today I dropped off half a dozen protest signs that I had made 2 years ago at the home of a woman I know loosely from the pro-choice movement. I had “advertised” that the signs were free to a good home because my full-time job prevents me from attending protests these days. They were well made and in good shape and I wanted them to be used. She joked that attending pro-choice protests was her “retirement job.” I was about to reply that I hoped I had a retirement job as awesome as protesting, but I stopped myself.

In 40-odd years when I retire, I do not want there to be a need for me to protest. I want a abortion rights to be so ingrained in our culture that I can sit back and enjoy my retirement. The thought that in 40 years that may not be the case is absolutely horrifying. How much longer can we continue to fight for abortion rights? It has already been decades and some days it feels as we are moving backwards, particularly in the United States, where abortion bans continue to apply to earlier and earlier pregnancies, and involve increasingly onerous hurdles for women. Here in Canada, backbench CPC MPs continue to hide abortion bans by touting them as bills to “protect” women, including sex-selection abortion bills. Despite the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, stating emphatically that the abortion debate would not be re-opened while he is Prime Minister, I cannot recall a more active time for abortion-restricting bills than the last few years. So far they have all been unsuccessful because our pro-choice community ruthlessly attacks the underlying premise of each of them, but how long must we continue?

How much longer will we have women (and men) who retire to spend their free time protesting events all over the province? These are the men and women who remember when women were dying from botched abortions, many who actually knew somebody who died. What will happen when the only activists remaining are those who were not alive when there were wards designated to care for women dying from a back alley abortion? I am certainly not suggesting that the activists who do not remember those days are any less committed, but the women and men who do remember those days will most certainly pass away before my generation retires and has time to attend protests full-time.

In 40 years, my Canada will be one where a woman’s inalienable right to choice will be questioned by so few in society that they are dismissed as whackos. In 40 years my Canada will be one where youth have never attended at a pro-choice rally because it was unnecessary; because women have had the undeniable right to abortion for so long that they do not recall a time when it was in dispute, just as I do not recall a time when it was illegal. In 40 years, when I retire, my Canada will be pro-choice.

Happy holidays from all of us at the Abortion Gang. We’re taking a short blogging vacation and will be back in January with the same sassy and sharp reproductive justice commentary that you love. If you miss us too much, find us on twitter and facebook.

PS Thanks to the amazing and talented Megan for our holiday graphic.

The trouble with privilege is that until somebody explains it to you, you don’t know you have it. And even when somebody explains it to you, sometimes you are too scared to admit that you are wrong, and you refuse to accept that you have it. Privilege is many things wrapped up into one, big arrogant ball.

Privilege is what allows men like Akin to make comments like “legitimate rape.” It’s what allows the rich to say success is all about hard work. It’s what allows heterosexuals to say that sexuality is a choice. It’s what allows white folks to ignore the correlation between skin colour, poverty, and rates of incarceration. It’s what allows anti-choicers to say that unplanned pregnancies are a result of “irresponsibility,” and then turn around and get abortions because it wasn’t their fault they ended up with an unplanned pregnancy. Privilege is what allows people to walk through this world viewing everything as black and white and pretending that their lives are successful because of the choices they made, and that the lives of the less fortunate are that way because they made bad choices. Arrogance is what allows those same people who end up in a bad spot blame somebody else for their circumstances, while still blaming those in their situation for their circumstances.

The trouble with privilege is that it is insidious. Unless you are watching for it, privilege sneaks into your thought processes and you never even know it. The trouble with identifying privilege is that it forces you to change your entire worldview; to abolish a belief system that you have held for decades; to accept that you are a white, successful, middle-class+ individual with a home, a good job, and money for vacations in large part because of blind dumb luck. Luck that you were born in a wealthy country and not an impoverished one. Luck that you were born with the privileges associated with being white, rather than the barriers that come with being black or latino. Luck that you were born a man and not a woman because your chance: of an unplanned pregnancy is zero, of being raped is slim, of being paid less for equal work is low, of having your body more regulated than food production is unlikely, or of being made to feel that you are less human than a collection of cells is unfathomable. (more…)

A post by Steph Herold and Megan Smith.

Coverage of Representative Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments have ignited a media storm. It’s clear that Akin’s remarks are more than just misinformation about reproductive health, and that they could have devastating and divisive policy implications for abortion rights and access. Akin’s comments have also sparked a conversation about abortion exceptions, “legitimate” reasons to have an abortion, or if we should even be talking about those reasons.

What do we know about abortion exceptions? We know that they make it harder for anyone to get an abortion, including each person who falls under exceptions such as rape, incest, or threat to the person’s life. Many of us in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements have written about and fought against the concept of “legitimate” or “acceptable” reasons to have an abortion. Of course we agree that no one should differentiate between an individual’s circumstances surrounding an abortion decision. But that doesn’t mean that we, and by extension, our movement, don’t also play into labelling some abortions as more necessary, important, or worthy of funding than others.

This happens most noticeably at the policy level. We fight for legislation that grants military insurance coverage for abortion in cases of rape instead of fighting for military insurance to cover abortion regardless of if it was an instance of rape or not. When state legislators try to ban later abortions, we trot out stories of people who’ve needed later abortions for fetal anomalies, not those who need later abortions for less sympathetic reasons. And, more recently, the progressive media is aghast that the GOP platform includes an anti-abortion amendment that doesn’t give an exception for rape, when really, shouldn’t we be up in arms that there is an anti-abortion amendment, period?

We see this manifest in a different way in direct service organizations. Our work as abortion fund volunteers is grounded in the belief that each person has a human right to bodily autonomy and to health care access. We trust that a person has the ability to make their own abortion decision, and we do not honor one person’s experience over another. But we also recognize that despite our commitment to providing non-judgmental and compassionate services, we are human–we hold to our own beliefs, or our organization’s beliefs, about who is more deserving of or more in need of our assistance. Even as we are actively trying to shed ourselves of placing more or less value on one person’s experience, we cannot ignore that we have and will continue to make exceptions for those with more difficult circumstances and less access to services.

Abortion funds operate under hostile climates with limited financial resources. That leaves many of us asking difficult questions: who most deserves our limited financial assistance? This is the reality we live in. We know some of us will give more funding to a person who is the survivor of sexual assault instead of someone who is not, or to a  person who is having a later abortion because of a fatal fetal anomaly than someone who is having a later abortion because she took a longer time coming to the decision to have an abortion. Why? Because we don’t have enough money to help every individual, and we want our time and money to go to the people who “really need it”: those who are the most marginalized and therefore have the slimmest chances of accessing services on their own. No matter how much we try to get out of the paradigm that some people deserve our help more than others, the reality is that we have to prioritize, to triage. As a result, whether we like it or not, we are complicit in the exceptionalization of certain abortions.

We live and work in a country where abortion providers and grassroots reproductive justice organizations like abortion funds are becoming more and more scarce. With few funding and staff  to operate, we are forced to limit the populations we serve to those we deem most in need of care. What we need to constantly keep in mind is how we are deciding who is most in need of help, and reevaluating how that fits in with our values. Are we ok with only helping certain kinds of people who need abortions? Can we strategize for a future in which we don’t have to make these tough decisions? How can we get there?

Creating our own exceptions and hierarchy of abortion situations is a necessary evil. It isn’t ideal, and it’s not what we strive for, but it is a reality of a broken system and a reflection of little time, and scarce funding, not to mention a hostile political climate. We did not choose this system, we can’t blame ourselves for operating in a way that allows us to function and sustain ourselves. But we also must ask tough questions about how we, as abortion funders and pro-choice activists, engage in abortion exceptionalism, and keep each other accountable for figuring out answers that reconcile our values with the difficult circumstances in which our organizations operate. We can fight for military insurance to cover abortion as a result of rape as long as we are also fighting to repeal the Hyde amendment. We can provide more funding to a cancer patient who needs an abortion as long as we are also figuring out ways to increase the amount of money we give people who aren’t in dire situations. As much as we critique abortion exceptionalism, we need to examine and acknowledge when we are complicit in it as well.

Dear Melinda,

I would like to start out by thanking you for hosting the London Summit on Family Planning.  This week, because of you, governments in some of the areas with the least investment in family planning have pledged to double, triple, even quadruple their family planning budgets.  Donor countries have pledged $2.6 billion to the global south.  A few years ago, this would have been unimaginable.

Your foundation has tackled, in a big way, the problems no other large foundations were funding: diarrheal illness, pneumonia, vaccines, and maternal mortality.  And now it has pledged over a half billion dollars for family planning services.  This can’t have been easy for you, as a self-described practicing Catholic, although you join many other practicing Catholics who are driven by a vision of social justice.

It’s clear you’re passionate about this, and it’s clear you understand how access to contraception can improve the lives of women and their families.  But I would like to invite you to dig deeper into this issue.  You have stated, “We’re not talking about abortion. We’re not talking about population control…What I’m talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children’s lives and to give their families the best possible future.” But you cannot truly give women the power to control their lives if you do not acknowledge the human rights aspect of family planning.

Although you (and many others) frequently use the terms “family planning” and “contraception” interchangeably, they are not, in fact, the same.  Contraception refers to methods to prevent pregnancy, and what you called a “Summit on Family Planning” was really a “Summit on Contraception”.  Family planning is much broader; it acknowledges that women have the right to plan their families.  Access to contraception is a key component, but so are access to abortion services, treatment for infertility, and pre-pregnancy care.  And population control policies and contraceptive coercion, which haunt our past and continue in the present, must be acknowledged and fought against.

So we must talk about abortion, and we must talk about population control.  Thank you for all you’ve done for the women of the world so far, and are planning to do in the future, and please continue to listen to women.  If you ask the right questions, they will tell you stories about family members who died from unsafe abortions, friends who were sterilized without their consent, and neighbors who were rejected for being unable to conceive children.  All you have to do is listen.

Tomorrow, May 31, marks the three year anniversary of Dr. Tiller’s murder. In the wake of increasing restrictionson later abortions and mounting violence against abortion clinics, we at the Abortion Gang and the Provider Project want to honor Dr. Tiller’s legacy of compassionate care by hosting a collective blog remembrance in response to this question: How can the pro-choice and reproductive justice movements better support the people who have later abortions and providers who perform them?

Your post can directly answer this question, or use it as a jumping off point to talk about other issues, such as:

• Why is it so difficult for our movement to talk about and support later abortions?
• Reflecting on Dr. Tiller’s famous quote: ”Make no mistake, this battle is about self-determination by women of the direction and course of their lives and their family’s lives. Abortion is about women’s hopes and dreams. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.”

In your post, please link back to this blog post so that folks can come here and find links to other reflections on Dr. Tiller.

The Abortion Gang and the Provider Project will post links to pieces written answering this question, starting Thursday, May 31 through the following Thursday, June 7. Please feel free to forward this call for posts to anyone who you think would be interested in honoring Dr. Tiller’s legacy. Send the links to your posts to info@iamdrtiller.com and lily@theproviderproject.org, or tweet them to @IAmDrTiller and @Provider Project.

I am an unashamed and vocal atheist and have been for a couple of years now. I believe that the atheist community is a natural ally to abortion rights activists, but it is an often overlooked community.

Over the past couple years, atheists, particularly in the US, have become more vocal and visible. There have been dozens of bus ads and billboard ad campaigns by local atheist groups. The task of these campaigns has been to simply let our presence be known. A recent Canadian study showed that the public, as a whole, trusts atheists and rapists about the same (shocking, right?). This study is part of the reason that there has been such a drive to improve our profile. The goal is twofold: 1) to encourage “closet” atheists to “come out,” and 2) to show the public that we are normal people, who just happen to believe in god less than they do. Most importantly, we are not trying to “convert” people.

Atheist groups are often engaged in dogged enforcement of separation of church and state. The biggest problem for abortion rights activists is that the church is continually interfering with the state, and many politicians are incapable of grasping the simple concept of their separation. That is what led to this photograph, which included three men in religious garb on a panel of five men debating whether forcing an insurer to pay for birth control violated religious rights.

If abortion rights activists were able to remove religion and the church from the political sphere, we would be much more successful in improving access to abortion and contraception. Planned Parenthood is under attack from the religious right. The religious right are the ones equating birth control use with promiscuity, and abortion with murder. In the atheist/secular community, there are more certainly anti-choicers, but when they pop up on discussion boards, they are mercilessly criticized. Atheists love one thing above all else – logic. At a minimum, the majority understand that legal and safe abortion is necessary to save women’s lives because without it, women will resort to unsafe abortion methods. Even if they would consider themselves “personally pro-life,” they understand at a minimum that making abortion illegal does nothing to stop it. They know that access to comprehensive sex-education and contraception is imperative to lower unwanted pregnancies. Atheists accept statistics and logic, and that is why the majority support all of the things that abortion rights activists support; abortion access, contraception access, comprehensive sex-education, etc.

By no means is the secular community without its misogynists. There have been a few major kerfuffles, the least of which involved many of the (mainly male) secular community backing up a guy who relentlessly hit on a lone girl in an elevator at a secular conference, despite her requests that he stop. And when she published a video about the incident on her blog, the community went ape shit. Fortunately, the prominent “leaders” of the community, for the most part, consider themselves feminists and they backed up the victim. PZ Meyers of Pharyngula, Hemant Metha of Friendly Atheist, and Jen McCreight of Blag Hag, to name a few, were vocal supporters of a woman’s right to say ‘no’ and to have that respected. Unfortunately, this is in stark contrast to the leaders of mainstream religious organizations, who are no friends of feminists, as we all know.

I truly am not trying to attack religion. I know that there are a great many religious individuals who support abortion rights, including members of this blog. I simply believe that the abortion rights community needs to work with, or at least learn from, secular groups. The secular community is very good at fighting religious interference with state business, and we need their expertise if we want any abortion rights at all. The state has unlimited resources to torment women, and the Republicans have not only spent 2011 pursuing their “war on women,” but they are poised to return women to the dark ages, with the assistance of the churches and religious leaders. We must utilize our natural allies. The secular community is just as motivated to keep the church out of schools and public office as we are to keep them out of our uteri.

The atheist and secular communities are the natural allies of abortion rights activists and it is time for us to cultivate this relationship. We desperately need the assistance of secular groups to keep government out of our vaginas.

Navigating the world of humour can be difficult when you’re clued in. For me, an important part of being an extremely privileged feminist was learning to stop making jokes at the expense of others, particularly about rape and sexual assault. Some humour seems so pervasive in the dominant culture that people think it must be ok (like prison rape jokes, or someone-you-thought-was-a-woman-turns-out-to-be-a-man jokes, hahaha NO). However, the more you learn about oppression and privilege, the more you see how pervasive racism, transphobia, sexism, etc. etc. are in our culture, and how they grow and spread through “comedy.”

So with that said, can we agree as feminists (and human beings) that jokes where the punchline involves firebombing a facility whose staff and clients are under constant threat of being firebombed aren’t funny? Just like jokes about women being raped aren’t funny? The reason being that they aren’t challenging or subversive; they propagate the status quo. Clinics get bombed. That isn’t humour. It’s news.

This post tells us that Mavis Mantis, who identifies as a “radical feminist” (the fact that this term has been co-opted by trans-hating assholes is a topic for another day…), made the following “joke” regarding the recent Planned Parenthood bombing/arson in Wisconsin: “If they were going to bomb PP, they at least could have bombed Toronto (after that horrible lesbophobic “overcoming the cotton ceiling” workshop.)”

The workshop Mavis is referring to was run by Planned Parenthood Toronto and focused on “…draw[ing] attention to the ways in which trans women are socially constructed as undesirable, and are denied full participation in queer women’s communities.” We can argue all day as to whether this workshop is inherently lesbophobic, which is Mavis’s (and other “radical” feminists’) contention (hint: I disagree), but to suggest (even jokingly) that it merits having the clinic bombed is offensive and frightening. As if the staff running that workshop don’t go to work every day with the threat of bombing hanging over their heads. As if the queer and trans participants don’t face the threat of violence and murder every day of their lives. As if this is how we “punish” supposed transgressions from our allies.

As a cis woman and a feminist, I reject and condemn such bullying tactics – that is pretty much the bare minimum of what I can do as an ally to trans folks and as a decent human being. As a person who lives, works, and accesses sexual and reproductive health care services in Toronto, I am frightened by the anger behind this “joke” and by the implied spirit of violently correcting perceived mistakes in the feminism and social justice efforts of others. And as a former clinic worker, I am appalled by the levity with which the daily threat of violence is treated by this supposed ally.

Here’s a thought: what does firebombing anything accomplish? I don’t think we can’t joke about firebombing things, but really, let’s at least be subversive about it. There’s nothing new or hilarious about saying you want to firebomb Planned Parenthood, because a lot of assholes want to firebomb Planned Parenthood. And it’s especially unfunny to joke about violently punishing people or organizations that attempt to offer support to trans folks, because guess what? Trans folks get threatened with violence pretty much every day of their lives.

Just because allies are thin on the ground doesn’t mean we have to accept any old self-identified feminist that comes along. As someone who believes strongly that trans folks, queer folks, clinic staff and their allies and supporters deserve to be safe every day, I strongly and unequivocally condemn any “joke” or statement from any person – feminist-identified or otherwise – that uses violence or the threat of violence against anyone as a punchline or something that can be treated lightly. My feminism is not just implicitly intersectional; it is explicitly anti-transphobia and anti-violence. Haters need not apply.

We’re taking this week off for some much needed rest and relaxation. Check back the week of March 18 when we’ll resume our regular schedule of reproductive justice badassery.

Love,

The Abortion Gang

The women and men in the pro-choice movement can be some of the most uplifting, wonderful, caring people that I have ever met. And most of the time, we are tirelessly patient with antis, political leaders and fence-sitters. The patience that we project can be inspiring and impressive, because, as a movement, somehow, WE have been tasked with always being the “reasonable ones.” We are the ones who double- and triple-edit our comments on blogs and in papers for tone, accuracy, and -isms (sexism, sizeism, racism, etc.). We are the ones who have to calmly and patiently walk through gauntlets of antis screaming and harassing women outside of clinics. We have to police ourselves constantly for any whiffs of “crazy.” Because we’ve been branded, we are always needing to prove ourselves.

But I’ve noticed that our patience is being worn thin. The constant pressure to be something other than human; to be the ones who are always logical, calm, cool and collected, is getting to us. We are starting to get tired. And in our tiredness, we are starting to go after the ones who are the closest to us: each other. On the blog, we consistently receive hate mail from antis (I simply do not understand how Steph handles it on a regular basis. I would go insane.) This is, at the very least, expected. But on some of our more recent posts, the hate mail was coming from other pro-choicers. Simply because we disagreed with something that was said by another pro-choicer. We did not intend to attack that person. In fact, we went to lengths to avoid that very thing. It backfired, and we are still feeling the sting.

Somehow, amongst ourselves, we have unintentionally created an environment where there we can’t disagree with each other or ask for help from each other. We will gladly band together against a common enemy, but we have ostracized our friends. Just a few days ago, two important women in our movement disagreed with each other publicly, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I’m not going to link to articles, because that would be fanning the flames, but I have to admit that I am frustrated by this.

We are often forced to use up our compassion on those who would work against us. This is exhausting. I would suggest that when we find ourselves trying to be compassionate with each other, it’s the opposite. It’s fulfilling and rejuvenating. We should be critiquing each other and the movement on a regular basis. How else can we improve? How else can we become more effective? But we need to try to do it with respect and care. Sometimes we’ll be really good at this, and sometimes we’ll be really bad at it. There will be a learning curve, to be sure, but it would be great if we could get a place where we are more good than bad at it, so that we can redirect our energy elsewhere.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but I feel like it’s becoming more common as more and more women’s rights are coming under fire. I’m begging that we stop and consider the fact that we are all tired. We are all tired of fighting for things that should be or already are legally our rights, we are tired of having to be patient with the other side, we are tired of reading hate mail, we are tired from the million other things that are happening in our daily lives. We are tired. But we have to remember that we are a family, and we will always be there for each other, even when we disagree or don’t particularly like some other person for the moment. And that is something special, that we need to cherish, especially when we are at our wits end and our most exhausted.