THIS IS NOT A VICTORY.

A victory would be if Komen acknowledged that their decision was based in partisan politics and then actually decided to remedy the issue by removing executives who are pandering to political bases. A victory would be if they doubled or tripled their contribution to not just Planned Parenthood, but to the institutions who do life-saving stem cell research, from whom they recently pulled over $12MILLION in support. A victory would be if their fake apology didn’t at the same time justify their decision to defund Planned Parenthood as “right and fair.”

Just because Komen decided that it would be better to reverse their decision than risk absolving their business is not a victory. Stop congratulating them on doing what could still barely be considered “the right thing.” Nancy Brinker and the Board of Directors has rightfully earned public scorn and a loss in “donations” (revenue).

We cannot accept their about-face as a victory because we are doing a disservice to all of these other wonderful organizations that have never abandoned their commitment to saving lives. So, I’m begging you, don’t go have a drink to celebrate because Komen decided not to remain GIGANTIC asshats. Have a drink and prep for our next battle, because this is far from over.

My combined interest in conservation and lady stuff naturally led me to tampon and pad alternatives. In my early twenties, all the cool enlightened feminists I knew were talking about Diva Cups. I had already read about bleached tampons and toxic shock syndrome, and I also kinda hated the whole process of using pads and how much paper was produced, and the constant possibilities for embarrassment (come on, who hasn’t shown up for class with a pad stuck to their jeans?). So I was pretty excited for something new.

I did my research first, because $40 was a lot of money for me, an unemployed college student. I knew it would save me a lot of money in the long term, but “long term” has never really been a mainstay in my financial vocabulary. So first, to make sure it would be okay for me, I bought the disposable menstrual cup things. They look like a clear plastic bag attached to a livestrong bracelet – you sort of squeeze the rim together and shove it up until it’s sitting against your cervix.

I tried the disposable cups for two periods and I liked them. I bought the Diva Cup. And I hated it.

I tried, I really did. It was forty dollars, after all. I tried using it for three cycles, and then I gave up.

The problem was that I could never get it to feel comfortable. Now I know that I have an unusually long and narrow vaginal canal (thanks, horrible IUD insertion!) and a weirdly tilted cervix, I guess the problem was that I wasn’t getting it in far enough to sit against my cervix. When you’re putting something solid like that into your vagina you tend to get increasingly nervous the further you shove it, and I just didn’t want to push it too far. However, even now that I know that, I’m not sure I would want to try it again. When it comes to menstrual blood, I’m more on the side of flow than containment.

I couldn’t go back to disposable pads and tampons though – I felt like I was losing enough ecofeminist cred as it was. That’s when I discovered cloth pads. Wonderful, lovely cloth pads. Again, they are expensive – but you can use them for a long time, so you save money in the long run. And they can be messy, but if you are diligent about soaking them before throwing them in the wash, it’s really no biggie. I kind of love them. Also, they can be an opportunity to support independent crafters!

It wasn’t until a couple years after I gave up on the Diva Cup that I even said anything about it to anyone. One of the volunteers at the clinic asked me if I had one. Before I could answer, she started to tell me about hers – how much she hated it, how she was trying so hard to like it, how she couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong. I was so happy to have found someone who shared this with me!

I really think that feminists have a code like any other group, silent unwritten rules that vary from chapter to chapter, and one of them (at least in the circle I was running with at the time) was that under no circumstances were you to badmouth any of the great feminist advances – the pill, the Diva Cup, etc. etc. Maybe that was just in my head, I don’t know. But I was so relieved to find there was another feminist (and presumably lots more out there) who wasn’t as stoked about this great device as everyone else.

The lesson, I guess, is that everyone is different. I would never go around badmouthing the Diva Cup (in fact, I promote it as much as I can – after all, most of the people I know who have it, love it), but I’m always careful to tell people who ask me about it that it’s ok to feel like it didn’t work out for you. The more people who are upfront about what’s not working for them, the more chance there is that something else will come along to meet those needs.

So if you are thinking about chucking pads and tampons for something earth-friendly, I recommend doing your research (either online, with friends, or if you have a local feminist sex shop or health store,ask the staff about your options), and considering what features you’re looking for (eg. how comfortable do you feel putting something inside you?, etc.) before committing. Your comfort and safety should always be at the forefront of decisions you make about your body, so don’t be afraid to take some time to choose.

Good luck and happy bleeding!

While I heartily agree that a state legislature has no place telling doctors which procedures their patients must undergo, and I recognize that the Senator is trying to make a point in a political theater, I think in the end making comparisons such as these do us a disservice. They minimize what a pregnancy truly means in the life of a woman.

Sexual dysfunction is a serious matter that can affect a man’s emotional and sexual well-being in important ways. However, pregnancy affects women in a more profound way. It affects not only a woman’s emotional and sexual well-being, but also her general physical health, and her financial health. If she continues the pregnancy and gives birth it affects every minute of her day for many years to come.

The idea that medical treatment for male sexual dysfunction is a fair analogy to medical treatment to prevent or treat undesired pregnancy has always bothered me. It minimizes the profound impact pregnancy has on women’s lives. I can’t think of any event common to the male experience that compares. And perhaps that is exactly the problem.

Stigma manifested itself in a number of ways. For one, the abortion doula decided to use this quote to describe why women have abortions: “A woman wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Unbeknownst to the doula, this quote is from the anti-choice group Feminists for Life, and is meant to describe a desperation that is destructive, a desperation that leaves a woman alive but (literally) hurt by the experience. Did the doula know the context of this quote? No, and I’m sure she thought she was somehow making women who have abortions sympathetic to the audience. Regardless of the quote’s origins, do we really want to discuss abortion in the context of self-mutilation? To do so is misleading, manipulative, and harmful.

The doula wasn’t the only person to perpetuate abortion stigma. During the Q&A after the panel, several women shared their abortion stories. One woman in particular mentioned that after listening to the representative from Exhale, she felt guilty for not feeling regret after her abortion. I have no doubt that Exhale provides support to women regardless of how they feel after their abortions, but there is something not quite right with your messaging if you’re making women question the validity of their emotional responses, positive or negative.

What surprised me most about the event (though it really shouldn’t have surprised me) was how much both the provider and the doula emphasized that most abortions are not later abortions, and that later abortions are particularly icky. The provider casually mentioned that some people pass out when they see later abortions (giving absolutely no context as to why, leaving the audience to assume the worst), the doula emphasized that all women who have later abortions cry their eyes out before and afterwards. Is it true that some people pass out and some women cry? Of course. But to lay out these statements as universal truths is misinformation, and stigmatizes later abortions (what could be so bad that people pass out??) and the women who have them (what could be so bad that they cry all the time?). What could’ve been useful: some science on later abortions and the women who have them. The truth? Most people don’t pass out. Some women cry, some women don’t. Making later abortions sound like gruesome tragedies stigmatizes the women who need them and the clinicians who perform them.

I understand why we emphasize that the majority of abortions are first trimester abortions from a PR standpoint–most people are grossed out by the idea of later abortions, I get it. And the reality is that most abortions happen in the first trimester. But does emphasizing this over and over do anything besides stigmatize later abortions? Shouldn’t we have empathy, respect, and compassion for all women who need abortions no matter when they have them? We do our movement, and the women we serve, a disservice when we say that an early abortion is ideal and a later abortion is tragic or bad. In doing so, we lose the nuance of why women have abortions, of their personal stories, and instead focus on what makes us comfortable or uncomfortable. It’s not about us. It’s about the women who have abortions.

I don’t want to give the impression that this event was a disaster. In fact, it was the exact opposite. What could be better than an enthusiastic and eager audience listening to experts talk about the ins and outs of getting an abortion? With that said, I do not think the pro-choice movement is absolved from thinking about how we perpetuate certain myths and stigma surrounding abortion. It’s not just the anti-choice folks who succeed in this role. We clearly have some work to do on our own.

Note: To clarify, this post is not meant as a criticism of the work of any of the organizations represented by individuals on this panel. Rather, this post is a critique of abortion stigma, and is meant to cast a light on how pervasive this stigma is, as even members of the pro-choice movement ourselves perpetuate it. 

When a patient goes to Planned Parenthood, she (or he) is often struggling financially. More often than not, she doesn’t have health insurance and uses Planned Parenthood as one of her only means to access health care. Patients go to Planned Parenthood when they need an annual exam, an STI test, or they are ill and need advice. Planned Parenthood is so incredibly vital because it offers cancer screenings, abortion care, STI/HIV testing and treatment, and many other services to people that would not be able to access those services without Planned Parenthood.

Anyone that knows health insurance knows that without access to preventive care, or a place to treat the common STI or cold, people go to the place that can help them (hopefully) get well and is not legally allowed to turn them away if they are unable to pay up front: the hospital emergency room. In a complicated and drawn out process, those visits to the ER end up costing the tax payer and insurance policy holders, so the common American’s premiums go up.

Now, I’m not blaming the people that go to the ER, I’m blaming our culture that puts them in the position to have to go to the ER when they should be able to go to, say, Planned Parenthood to treat an STI or to get a pregnancy test and maternity care. Because when a woman goes to Planned Parenthood for an PAP smear, finds she has abnormal cells on her cervix (HPV), and is able to obtain appropriate treatment to avoid cancer, she’s not only helping herself. She’s also avoiding a potentially life-threatening disease and costing our healthcare system far less than a trip to the ER or cancer treatment.

You fucked up, Susan G. Komen Foundation. The Foundation’s cowardly retreat during a highly charged political atmosphere is no doubt motivated by the threat of dwindling donations if they don’t stop helping Planned Parenthood keep women healthy. They are ultimately more worried about being able to please corporate sponsors than you know, actually helping people that might have cancer.

And there is no “abortion debate.” There is a group of white men in political and social leadership roles that have no way to stay in office and places of power without pandering to the we-want-to-control-women vote, who must pander to their religious sponsors who also want to control women. Access is being threatened because Planned Parenthood, an organization whose services comprise cancer screening/prenatal care/STI and HIV testing and treatment in addition to safe abortion care , is under attack and losing grants.

Is this the country we want ? Write to Susan G. Komen for the Cure and let them know that grants to Planned Parenthood are grants to prevent cancer!

I feel strongly that more women’s stories of having abortions need to be told, need to be heard. We need to encourage each other as women to come out of the shadows, out of the shame, and out of the imposed stigma. It’s only by the sharing of our stories and asserting the rightness of those choices (especially when they include abortion) that we begin to dismantle the stigma of abortion.

I’m proud to know @KnittingRad; for this and many other reasons she’s a brave, fierce woman.

First dates, at least in my experience, typically cover the basics. Profession, state or town of origin, and a lengthy list of the most interesting hobbies that each participant can rattle off. A recent first date of mine resembled a geography bee as my date angled to impress me with the various places to which he had traveled.

No one wants to appear to be unattractive, either physically or otherwise, while on a date. So, hewing to advice long ingrained in us by our parents and teachers we stay away from topics like religion, doctors and politics. I may know whether the man sitting across from me is the “nice Jewish boy” of my (and my mother’s) dreams based upon stories of a childhood at Camp Ramah or be able to guess based upon a last name ending in “stein” or “witz,” but unless I ask, how will I know how he feels about abortion?

Straddling religion and politics, the A-word, as I privately call it, is at once both intensely personal and wildly inflammatory given the current political environment. There is no easy way to slip it into conversation on a first date. On a second or third date, when we have moved on to feigning enthusiasm for activities like bowling, salsa dancing and traipsing through numerous local tourist attractions, it seems even harder to ask the question. After all, the goal while dating is to show off the most fun, worldly yet not crazy version of ourselves, and while abortion is implicitly linked to sex, there is nothing sexy about it.

Still, I cannot imagine ever hopping into bed with someone without knowing now he feels about abortion and the current laws restricting it.

I’m curious, am I the only one who struggles with how to best ferret out is nugget of information? Would you stop dating an otherwise seemingly normal person if you found out that they were anti-choice?

I think this is a quandry that many of us can relate to. As activists, we’re so busy taking care of other people that it’s often hard to find time to take care of ourselves.

One of my mentors gave me some good advice when I graduated from college. “Take care of yourself,” she said, “or you will burn out and you won’t be able to take care of anyone else.” I followed her advice by treating myself to expensive haircuts, cheap pedicures, and frequent sushi dinners. My budget ain’t what it used to be – so these days my version of treating myself involves a six-pack of cheap beer and a Netflix marathon.

I know I’m not the only one who struggles with self care. If you work at a clinic or an abortion fund, how do you decompress at the end of a shift? Do you have a hard time disconnecting from other people’s emotional baggage like I do, or have you developed a successful strategy for being compassionate and still taking care of your own emotional well being?

On the same note, for those of us with anti-choice family members, how do you handle family gatherings? I have typically tried to avoid discussing health care or politics. But that strategy crapped out on me over the holidays when my mom started asking me why I don’t support adoption over abortion. I walked away from a fight and took a shower to calm down. However, I can’t do that with every confrontation. I’d love to find a few strategies for dealing with anti-choice family confrontations.

How you practice self-care?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A guest post by Gwen Emmons.

One of the most common questions reproductive justice activists get is why we focus on choice in a time where so many other pressing issues – jobs, poverty, healthcare reform – have yet to be solved.

My answer is simple: they’re all connected. And on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I think it’s more crucial than ever to reflect on how reproductive autonomy fits in to the bigger question of realizing the American dream.

The ability to determine the timing and spacing of one’s pregnancies (or whether to be pregnant at all) contributes to your ability to enjoy economic security. Unplanned pregnancies can, unfortunately, be costly (particularly if you are un- or under-insured) and can impact your ability to work in some cases. Having the ability to control your reproduction is crucial to controlling your economic destiny.

Access to safe abortion care, contraception, Plan B, medically accurate sex ed, and affordable gynecological screenings and childcare services are at the base of the pyramid that makes up that American dream. Lose Roe – or any of these other pieces – and we risk toppling that pyramid. Unfortunately, for too many women and men, that’s already happening. And it’s shameful.

The flip side of this is that instead of fixing things like poverty, the economy, or our healthcare system, legislators in Pennsylvania and across the country have focused their efforts on chipping away at choice. Spoiler alert: restricting access to Plan B doesn’t create jobs. Draconian restrictions on abortion services won’t fix our economy.

So as we celebrate 39 years of access to safe, legal abortion, let’s reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that reproductive rights – and the American dream – remain attainable to everyone.