Abortion Gang

A guest post from Sarah Erdreich, the author of Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is currently on trial in Pennsylvania, charged with eight counts of murder. For decades, Gosnell provided abortion services to primarily low-income, minority, and immigrant women in an unsafe and unhygienic clinic. Despite numerous complaints to state agencies and the forty-six lawsuits filed against him, Gosnell’s clinic was only inspected five times after it opened in 1979; the last inspection occurred in 1993. When officials finally did raid his clinic in 2010, it was on suspicion of drug violations. The eight counts of murder that Gosnell faces include one for a woman that died from a painkiller overdose before her procedure, and seven infants that he allegedly killed with scissors after they were born.

Those acts, together with a grand jury report that spares no detail in describing the squalid and unhygienic conditions of Gosnell’s clinic, paint a grim picture of a man that never should have been allowed to practice medicine. They also call into question just why state agencies did so little to investigate the many complaints that were made over two decades.

The state of Pennsylvania has responded by enacting new anti-choice laws that make abortion care more difficult for people to access and afford. Clinics that provide surgical abortions now must meet the same medical and construction standards as outpatient surgery centers; while clinics were exempt from some regulations, such as having elevators of a certain size, a number of the new regulations required clinics to undergo expensive renovations. In 2008, 82% of all Pennsylvania counties lacked an abortion provider; five clinics have closed in the last year, meaning that that number is undoubtedly even higher now.

Pennsylvania is hardly alone in requiring only abortion clinics, as opposed to all freestanding outpatient surgical clinics, to adhere to specific and extensive standards. From insisting that providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals to mandating the size of operating rooms, states around the country have enacted numerous laws in the past several years that sound benign on paper but have devastating real-life effects. The rationale for many of these laws is that they are necessary to safeguard the health and well-being of people who need abortion care. But when legal abortions are performed by trained medical professionals, the health risks are already very low; according to the non-partisan Guttmacher Institute, “[f]ewer than 1% of all U.S. abortion patients experience a major complication and the risk of death associated with abortion is 10 times as low as that associated with childbirth.”

When a woman dies during childbirth, politicians do not insist that all hospitals adhere to new structural requirements, and activists do not claim that since a woman died, no OB/GYN should be trusted. Yet the anti-choice movement has shown no such common sense and sound judgment when it comes to Kermit Gosnell. Instead, they have exploited this tragedy to enact laws that either force clinics to charge more for their services so they can pay for renovations, or close altogether. Making abortion more expensive and less accessible will not lower the abortion rate in this country. Instead, it will create an environment that drives women to desperate measures such as self-abortion or turning to untrained, but inexpensive, physicians.

For a short period in the early days of my pro-choice activism, I had a nemesis. The fact that she didn’t know about it may have lessened the impact. My nemesis was a young woman who was heavily involved in a pro-life organization that did some protesting of the abortion clinic where I worked at the time; I found out her name and used to creep her on Facebook, but truth be told it wasn’t that interesting. She was a standard, young white Christian type, super involved in vanilla stuff like music or Sunday school or whatever, saving herself until marriage with some equally non-threatening young man.

The one thing that was edgy about my nemesis (at least as far as her peer group went) was that she had a tattoo – a Bible quote that could be interpreted as anti-abortion. I remember thinking smugly to myself how silly she was to get such a strong statement tattooed on her so young; what if later she figured out the complexities of the issue and changed her stance? Or what if it just became less of an issue for her?

I know now that I was being kind of an asshole, after a few years of being a woman and having my own permanent choices (including, but not limited to, tattoos) being questioned. It makes me think of the double standard around having children that I have been coming up against lately: folks who don’t ever want to have kids seem to face a lot more questioning and condescending “oh you’ll change your mind someday” bullshit than the people actually having kids, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. (Obviously this is based on my own experience and is probably different for folks of different colours/ages/culture backgrounds/sexual identities/etc.).

Anyway this is all coming up because I got a tattoo this week, and unlike my two previous tattoos it is a. political, and b. almost always visible. I have been thinking about this one for almost five years, and when I look at it I feel 100% awesome about it, but I know there’s a chance that won’t always be the case. But it’s the chance you take, just like my nemesis took a chance that she would always be against abortion and a Christian. You can’t really know how things are going to go in life, but it’s too short to hold back, I think.

Next week I am getting my second IUD inserted, a five year placeholder on the road to whenever they finally let me be permanently sterilized. I’ve known I don’t want kids for way longer than I’ve known I wanted this tattoo, but I still hear this junk about maybe changing my mind – more than I’ve ever heard about maybe regretting that tattoo. I know it’s not really the same, but I feel like they’re bound together by the horrible kinship of policing women’s bodies, choices and lives. The only person who gets to give my new tat the side-eye is my mother, and that’s only really because it’s inevitable. And the only person who gets to question my decision to never be pregnant is exactly no one.

I am the expert on my own life. My body is part of that. Trust my decisions, because I’m the one who has to live with them; but more importantly, because it’s none of your damn business.

I was 24 before I first realized you could be a woman, live your life and not have kids. Or even not be married when you are “old.” (And by “old” I mean in your 40s because that’s what I thought was “old” was back then, this-author-writes-as-she-rapidly-approaches-age-40).

It was at my second job out of college I worked with a woman who was 42, child-free, single and living alone. And I remember it being almost a revelation to me that “Wow, she didn’t have kids. Like, she’s past that point in her life now that’s even an option.”

Now a few caveats: yes some women have kids past the age of 42, but I didn’t think about it that way so to me it was like she had already crossed the Rubicon of menopause even though I don’t think my coworker actually had. I also don’t know if she didn’t want kids, or couldn’t have kids or anything about why she didn’t have them when I met her.

I remember in a weird way viewing her as slightly alien because she was the first adult woman that I could recall who was “40” and didn’t have a husband and kids. It felt like “Oh I want to avoid that fate.” In fact I may have even told friends “I don’t want to be in her situation when I get to that age.”

It really seems strange to me that I was as old as 24 before I met a single, child-free woman. My parents had been long-time friends with a married couple who didn’t have children – a couple I regarded with some suspicion based on the fact that once on an outing when I was 10 the woman told my mom she hadn’t realized my parents were going to bring me along in a way to suggest she didn’t enjoy my company. This single incident — which as an adult who is nervous around kids I completely understand – gave me a childish sense of rejection. I think in a lot of my books and cartoon TV shows a villain was someone who didn’t like children, and so I decided this woman must be a villain for not finding me awesome and amazing. I realized in a way my thoughts about this childless couple (the villains who don’t like kids) subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, had coated my thoughts about people who didn’t have kids. (Which was something I had to remind myself to overtly fight against when I had dinner with the couple recently…”oh right, I don’t dislike them!”)

What was more startling to me, wasn’t just the thought of a woman never having kids, was also the concept of being “single” at 42 and how I automatically viewed it as a failure of some kind. Of course my mother was friends with some women who were divorced. I’m sure not all of my high school teachers or college professors were married. But they weren’t people I viewed as peers in the way I viewed my coworker. She was a fully-formed 3-dimensional person to me. She wasn’t an abstract construction (“my mother’s friend”) or a distantly-known fact about someone I didn’t know very well.

While I now know many child-free, single adult women, my friends who are close to my age are all paired off, and many have started having kids. None of my closest female friends who are older than 35 are both single and child-free.

This 42-year-old coworker I met when I was 24 was really the first time I understood the idea that not everyone was married and not everyone would have kids. But it was not the time that I realized that this state of being a child-free, single adult women does not necessary mean one has a life of unhappiness. I think I still struggle to realize this fact.

The most surprising thing to say about the adoption plots in Paul Weitz’s new film Admission (starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd) is, really, how routine they seem. Six years ago — before Juno – it would have been remarkable to find a movie revolving around a birth mother and her story. But now, after Juno, 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, Glee, The Baby Wait, a birth mother story seems run of the mill. In fact, while waiting for Admission to being, there was a premiere for The Big Wedding, (starring Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro, Susan Sarandon, and many others) whichalso features a birth mother meeting her son’s adoptive family for the first time. Have we had enough of these stories?

I’m all for Hollywood to keep trying, since I feel like none of these representations have quite gotten it right. This isn’t surprising — movies are about being sensational and dramatic, and less about real-life complexity. The problem with Admission is that it manages to make adoption both a narrow and overwhelming part of the story. When Portia Nathan, an admission counselor at Princeton, discovers that an applicant might be the son she placed for adoption, this possibility seems to tap into some innate, essential well of motherly imperative. She begins empathizing with the frantic parents of other applicants, trying to hold random babies in stores, and bulldozing her way through the admissions process (without even a nod to professionalism) to ensure that her son will be able to attend Princeton. It looks and feels like an implosion, but the viewer is left to wonder if this is because of a recent breakup in which her boyfriend left her for his pregnant mistress, because of some unnamed and unrealized desire to parent, because of her own fractured relationship with her mother, because of her inability to know her own biological father, or because of watching her new romantic prospect interact with his adopted son. The adoption is addressed directly only occasionally, and often frantically, so we don’t have a clear understanding of what the impact has been on Portia’s life. What is the movie trying to say about adoption? Even after watching, I’m not sure.

What it does do, however, is place adoption in the context of a bigger sense of the unknown. Portia does not know her father, nor does she know her son. These disconnections prevent her from connecting with her mother in any meaningful way. We don’t know if Portia wants to be a mother, and perhaps she doesn’t either. In the end, it was this rootlessness that came across most strongly, and contrasted most sharply with the repeated classification of Portia’s life as stable and boring — but it was also what was glossed over most frequently for the sake of comedic purpose. In the end, the metaphor, whether intended or not (and it probably was), between adoption reunions and the college admissions process is at least partially true: the sense of putting oneself out there, of hanging one’s future on an unknowable verdict rendered by an unknown person, highlights how vulnerable adoption can make people.

Here’s hoping that the next birth mother movie — because goodness knows, it doesn’t seem like we’ll have any shortage of them — will find a way to give more space to this complexity.

“Life’s most difficult choices don’t always have easy answers. There are no free passes, no tap outs, and no do-overs. One thing’s for sure, the answers you’re looking for start with asking the tough questions. And you’re stronger than you think you are.” – From DifficultChoices.org

Though powerful, a quick dig into DifficultChoices.org reveals itself to be the work of a Colorado Springs based Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC).  The twist is it is couched as a forum for young people to share their reproductive health stories.  Now, the stories posted may indeed be real, but they most certainly don’t capture the scope of a young perople’s experiences, as in the land of CPC sponsored  adolescent abortion stories, no one actually has an abortion.

The site frames the stories through labels of respect, strength, or courage.  It’s not often such empowered language is used in respect to young people’s reproductive decisionmaking.  I liked it so much I thought that what they really needed was to expand the vision to the full true scope, including the respect, strength and courage it takes to have an abortion.  As such, I reached out to the Women’s Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder to see if they would put me in-touch with any young people willing to share their abortion stories, so that Colorado could be more adequately represented. Below are two abortion stories written by folks from Colorado who graciously shared a small part of themselves with us.  One older, one younger, both so incredibly honest and brave, perhaps Difficult Choices would like to recognize their strength and courage and add these stories to their website?

Strength

Dear Baby,

This is the week I gave you up. It’s been two years. You would have been a year and four months old. You would have been walking. You might even be calling me “Mom”. But Baby, as much as I yearn for those memories, I am so glad that I don’t have them. Rather I will have the memory of deciding to apply to the London School of Economics. Baby, if you had been here, I don’t think graduate school would have even crossed my mind. I probably would not be graduating in May. Yes, it is selfish to have let you go, but as I have told you many times, I have all the right to be selfish. If not now, when?

I am listening to the song that reminds me of you. “Las Simples Cosas” by Martirio. The singer says that one always says goodbye without much feeling to simple things. I want you to know that it hurt me to let you go. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life. This year I decided to stop loving who would have been your father. That was harder. Baby, he would have loved you so much. He is a great man. Unfortunately, he was not a great man to me. I always think of what could have been if you had been here. Maybe he wouldn’t have betrayed me like he did. Maybe he would have hurt me even more. I’m afraid he has forgotten about you. But that’s ok. You’ll always have me. I will always talk to you, even when I start to have…I guess, real children. You will hold a special place in my heart forever.

On Friday, I am going up to the mountains, where we buried what could have been. It’s beautiful and Orion is always so spectacular up there. I’ve told you before, but I think that’s where I fell in love with him. Last year, we went up there. We weren’t together, yet he took me up there, held me while I cried for you. I am so sorry Baby. I wish life had been different. I wish I could have been strong enough to have carried you and raised you. But Baby, you are in a wonderful place now. You are so much better there than here.

Baby, my world is crumbling around me. I feel so alone. I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me this way. I am trying so hard to keep it all together Baby. And it kills me to say this, but because you aren’t here I know I will be able to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. Because you aren’t here, I have the courage and strength to strive for more. Because you aren’t here, I will overcome.

I let go of you, and you will never know how much pain that caused me. Be assured that I will never forget you. I keep telling myself that I never loved you, but a bit of me did. I loved you enough to let you go. You were not a simple thing Baby, no you made me love life more, you allowed me to choose what I wanted and respect who I am, you gave me the power to see how valuable I am. I hope you understand that you gave me so much more than I lost. Baby, do me a favor, look at the star he gave me, the one left of Orion’s belt and ask it to twinkle a little brighter on Friday. Baby, I hope you are happy up there with all those magnificent lights and I hope one day you can forgive me. Know that instead of giving you life, I gave you an eternity up in the skies.

Courage

My name is Katherine and I am 41 years old. A year and a half ago, newly married, I had an abortion. It would have been a shot gun wedding, had I known I was pregnant, but because I was unaware it was a simple elopement in a junkyard.

I believe strongly in adoption and my first husband had a vasectomy during a time when I was angered by life and by myself. The idea of creating more children angered me. Many children of divorce don’t want the burden of creating a healthy outcome. But what is healthy? I was not ashamed of my abortion nor do I now feel the need to keep it private, a dirty secret. Let us call out the stigma that damages women in an irrevocable way.

I was 10 weeks pregnant when I was finally able to make it to the clinic. My breasts were magnificent, my belly plump and my alcohol consumption continued at a steady pace, an attempt at killing whatever joy could have come from this growing baby. My husband and I were married just four months after meeting, and along with my husband came a lovely 7 year old boy. Knowing that we were going to be caring for this child with the help of his mother for the rest our lives is the harsh reality we live with everyday. My stepson’s autism paired with our cynicism left no room for a new child, and I had accepted this.

I never wanted to be 40 and pregnant. However, as a caregiver of children, I was saddened to miss this opportunity to have my own child because in the face of a fucked up world there stares back the faces of justice. I often thought of my mother, long deceased and yet I ached for her and I to care for this baby together.

On the day of the procedure, I cried uncontrollably because my husband could not be there to support me. He had to care for his son at a time when no one else could be there, and so I pushed away everyone’s offers to take his place and went alone. I chose to rely on memories, the stories of close friends rowing the same boat, and the gracious, utterly kind women at the clinic.

What I had needed most was to cease being pregnant and return to my life again. As I write this, the beautiful 4 month old baby girl of my dearest friend plays next to me. I held her legs during the birth and have started working as her child’s caregiver giving her much needed support and friendship at a wonderful and challenging time in her life. This child makes me calm and insanely happy.

As women, it can still feel as if we are alone, certainly we are still victimized and subjugated, but as women we are fierce and capable as well. I do not shy away from the choice I made to be a mother to others peoples children, to help mother my stepson and to now love and help care for the child next to me. I fight everyday to be as strong as my mother and to keep strong the women in my life through honesty and compassion. And I am fortunate to have men in my life who give me hope and who fight for us, for a healthy future. Erasing the stigma of abortion or any of the choices we make as women is a healthy beginning.

______________________________

Clearly evidenced from these powerful stories, emotional resilience among people who have abortions is no small feat. In fact, I would go so far to say that these women display respect AND courage AND strength.

Last week, I got into a conversation (as I often do) on access to abortion. The exchange was pleasant and informative, but in the course of the conversation the other party expressed she did not support free choice if  “someone is using abortion as birth control.” In my experience (and other abortion ganger’s experiences as well), conversations about abortion often come to this same limit, or some version of ‘abortion is not an acceptable if’ statement.

And when the ‘if statements’ start flying I wonder: Why are we so afraid of liberating the use of abortion for whatever means an individual may choose? Why is it that when abortion comes up, some “moral limit” (within the legal limit) must be placed on the procedure? When society is not being harmed, these arguments against abortion as birth control become moral high-ground arguments that hurt the prochoice movement.

Of the approximate 6.7 million pregnancies a year in the US,  about half or 3.2 million are unintended pregnancies (Guttmacher, 2012). Once an unintended pregnancy occurs, even if a person chooses not to use birth control daily/during sex and becomes pregnant, isn’t abortion is the only form of birth control that can be used to control birth? Literally?

Honestly: If we consider that approximately 11% of all unintended pregnancy are a result of sex without contraception (Guttmacher, 2007).  The real concern is the US women/couples who are underserved or disserved by the contraceptives and/or reproductive health system available in the US. As KushielsMoon clearly explains here, contraceptives are scientifically different from birth control. Abortion, biologically is birth control, in every case, regardless of if contraception was used during sex or not.

Furthermore, safe, legal abortion is one of the most effective forms of birth control; in the US, abortion procedures only “fail” or need to be re-administered less than .5% of the time (NAF source).  Abortion is a safe reproductive experience, and repeating the procedure multiple times has not shown to have negative impacts on future reproductive abilities (See Ms. myth buster article & abortion support blog). However, advocating that using abortion for birth control is totally 100% OK/kosher/great/moral usually terrifies people.

Why? When we think about the burden an individual’s choice places on a society we usually think in terms of financial implications, public health burdens, and how the individual’s choice interacts with social morality.

Depending on how often it is needed, abortion is a relatively expensive form of birth control, but US Governments (unfortunately) are, in most cases, not paying for the procedure. The financial burden of an abortion falls more on the individual, and therefore is unlikely to negatively affect the financial solvency of the state or society. We need to respect the individual’s right to choose to spend their money on whichever birth control they may choose.

In terms of public health concerns, in the US, abortion is a safe and legal procedure. Sure, using condoms to prevent the transmission of STDs would be a better public health approach, but using abortion as birth control is no less acceptable than the IUD or the patch when it comes to concern for STD transmission. The only argument that remains for saying abortion control shouldn’t be birth control is a moral judgment that relying on abortion as birth control is unacceptable.

If someone wants to use abortion as birth control, let him or her do so. Let them because it is immoral to judge and shame a free choice behavior that is non-society-harming. Do it because you radically believe that abortion is moral every time it is done safely and legally. Abortion is birth control. Any time a person draws a moral line about abortion’s acceptability as a reproductive health decision they stunt our movement against stigma and toward free, safe choice.

The fight against marriage equality is a losing one. As the SCOTUS spends the week hearing oral arguments on Prop 8 in California (in which voters overturned a court decision that had allowed same-sex marriages in the state) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage because everyone is an asshole), half a dozen high-profile politicians from both sides of the aisle have tripped over themselves in a rush to support marriage equality and be able to point back in a few years and say they were on the right side of history, however closely they may have timed it. One of these politicians is former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, whose husband, while President, signed DOMA (because he is an asshole). That’s which way the wind is blowing, and no, you don’t need to a weatherman.

Public support for marriage equality has expanded so far so fast for several reasons. Some of it is growing public awareness, while some of it is the result of on-the-ground, grassroots legislative and communications efforts that have been decades in the making. And some of it is very simply that the arguments against marriage equality, now having been stripped down, over and over, to their composite pieces, have proven to stand on extremely thin legal ground. As the cases go before the SCOTUS, the arguments against marriage equality now break down into two recognizable composite pieces: plain old hate and homophobia, and children.

The debate about what’s good for children belongs to both sides of the marriage equality fight. Justice Kennedy, likely to be the swing vote on the issue, raised the question during Tuesday’s argument about the “immediate injury” suffered by children in California whose same-sex parents were not allowed to marry, saying, “They want their parents to have full recognition and status.” Justice Antonin Scalia, who is a well-known asshole, also raised the issue of children raised by same-sex parents while expertly trolling the nation, stating, erroneously, “There’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether it is harmful to the child or not.”

But more important than the general debate over the welfare of children being raised in this country is the essential question of what power the not yet conceived, future children of our nation should have on defining marriage. That may seem to be a ridiculous question, but that ridiculous question now forms almost the entire recognizable legal basis for the fight against marriage equality (hate and fear are perfectly legal but do not qualify as a legal basis for an argument).

The argument being made against marriage equality is known as “responsible procreation,” and Jeffrey Rosen explains it:

If the Court does decide the Perry case on the merits, it will come down to this claim: Because only straight people can impulsively and accidently have illegitimate children out of wedlock, they need a stable institution of marriage to discourage them from doing so and to force them to focus on the consequences of their animalistic passions. But as Justice Kagan noted, the idea that denying marriage equality to gay couples would encourage monogamy and responsible procreation by straight couples is hard to follow, let alone to fathom.

That is a fairly kind and comprehensible way of explaining what is actually an extremely opaque argument brought forward by the lawyers for Prop 8, which went as follows:

[S]ociety’s interest in responsible procreation isn’t just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself. The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy, Your Honor, advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that … marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage. Outside of that marriage. That’s the marital—that’s the marital norm.

This is what’s so fascinating: the right’s last great hope of limiting the definition of marriage is to do it by insisting that it the only way to continue to effectively legislative reproductive options. That’s amazing. This is an argument against same-sex marriage that actually says, “We need marriage as a tool to control what people who can have children without planning them are allowed to do. Same-sex couples have to plan children* so they don’t need to be controlled by us so we should not give them marriage.” I mean guys. Really. What. I can’t even.

Equally fascinating is the notion that marriage equality has come so far in the 12 years since the state of Massachusetts first allowed it that simply arguing against LGBTQ rights is no longer as effective as arguing in favor of controlling people’s reproductive options. Conversely, arguing the need to control people’s reproductive options, no matter how bizarre an argument that is, is now so effective that other kinds of rights can be allowed or denied based on the perceived need for this control.

An interesting side-note to all of this is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s argument directly relating marriage equality to Roe v Wade. She had previously raised, and raised again on Tuesday, the issue of marriage equality simply moving too fast – based on her conviction that that was the issue with Roe. “It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too fast,” she said, and has expressed concerns that marriage equality could face the same difficulty if not handled properly by the court.

I am over-the-moon excited by the push and the public support for marriage equality I am seeing this week. I can only hope we see something like it in the near-term for reproductive rights, and the framework we are seeing in these arguments is not a portent of legal battles to come.

*Uuuugggghhhhhh wild assumptions inaccuracies etc these people are assholes.

I used to only talk about my abortion with very close friends, my sisters (only when I found out one of them had had an abortion too), or people my friends knew who needed abortions and wanted someone to talk to. I was ashamed that I was a statistic: pregnant in college, too young to be a mom, too selfish. I told my boyfriends, when we would talk about accidental pregnancies, “You only get one [abortion]. There are no do-overs. I used mine already.”

For years, I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t talk about it until I did, and then never without crying. I wasn’t crying over the loss, though I felt that too. I would have an 8 year old. His birthday (I was convinced I was pregnant with a boy) would be in late-October or November. His missed birthday is a milestone I’ll never forget I didn’t have. For years though, I cried because I didn’t want to be judged. I didn’t want my friends, coworkers, acquaintances, or family members to look at me differently. I felt that while my abortion was right for me, it wasn’t right for the people in my life to know about it.

Then I found the Abortiongang. I felt compelled to write about my experience. Writing was easy because I could be nameless, faceless, totally anonymous if I chose to be. But it was a step. I decided to use my first name to sign my posts. Another step. I met Steph, and Shelby, and some of the other bloggers in person. I found a community of women braver than me. Every day Steph reads threats of violence towards herself, towards us, towards women in our feminist community, towards women of every shape, color and identity. I don’t know how she does it. But Kaitlyn, and Sophia, and Nicole, and Peggy, and everyone who currently writes or has ever written for us, and especially Shelby and Steph, inspired me to be more forthcoming.

I started doing little things, like talking about abortion with my close female colleagues. More of us have had abortions than I thought would be possible. I attended rallies and abortion fund-raising events. This process took over two years.

Now, nine years after my abortion, after three years of writing for the blog, I finally talk openly, to strangers, to acquaintances, about my abortion.

Inevitably, when meeting someone new, my dog will come up in conversation. Coincidentally, he’s nearly 8 years old. Everyone is surprised that I got a dog in college; so much responsibility! Now, instead of shying away from explaining how and why I got him, I start my story with “so after I had an abortion in college, I wanted to get a dog.” Bailey is a huge part of my abortion story because he helped me heal. He’s also a great way to turn what could be a conversation that feels defensive and shameful for me into a positive, happy, constructive conversation.

Inevitably, some people will look at my differently when I mention my abortion. My hope though, in sharing my story so casually and with love, is that the people who are listening will reevaluate their opinions on abortion, the people who get abortions, and the people they think abortion-havers become. It’s also a huge relief for me that I don’t have to keep hiding. I think I never needed to hide, and I hope that my sharing will help others share casually and happily too.

Good news! A new study recently released shows that feminism is not dying, but instead is growing! Since 2008, the number of women who identify as feminists has increased by 9 points. A full 55% of female voters call themselves feminists. Now you might think that only a specific group of women identify as feminist, but that’s not true. 58% of women under 30 and 54% of women over 30 identify as feminists. 72% of Democratic women and even 38% of Republican women identify as feminists. Feminism is not just a fad or the interest of one group, but instead an issue every group finds important. And yes, I do mean every group–one in three men identifies as a feminist too!

Even more important, I think, is that there are more women of color who identify as feminist than white women. The world of media outside of the feminist sphere seems to assume that feminists are all white women. Large, mainstream feminist organizations are often led by white women, and those are the people most often asked to speak for the feminist movement. But beyond the mainstream groups is a large number of grassroots, feminist organizations run by and for women of color. Organizations such as SisterSong, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Black Women’s Health Imperative and SPARAK RJ NOW all involve women of color working on feminist ideals within their communities. It is my hope that this information will be used by the large organizations such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Feminist Majority Foundation to create new hiring practices and new ways of listening. The groups most often asked to speak for our movement should be asking the reporters to speak with women from these other organizations, or finding new ways to connect with these grassroots activists. Hopefully this study wont just focus on how many people call themselves feminists, but who, why, and what they’re doing about it.

Of course, some people might wonder if people who label as feminist actually vote for feminist values. There have been a number of anti-abortion groups and other groups fighting against women’s rights that are trying to take up the feminist label. The study found that 64% of feminist-identified women voted for President Obama in the last election, as did 54% of feminist identified men. There could be more who voted third party as well. So yes, there is a strong correlation between the label feminist and voting for candidates who support women’s rights. There is power in having such a large, diversified group of people under one label. There are so many opportunities beyond electing a President- if we all stay in contact with our local Congresspeople, we can get so much more done.

Brazilian doctors’ group urges decriminalization of abortion

As in many countries in Latin America, abortion is extremely restricted in Brazil. Currently, women can only legally have an abortion if the pregnancy results from rape, if their lives are threatened by the pregnancy, or if the fetus has a brain anomaly. Despite these restrictions, abortion is widespread, with an estimated 1 million Brazilian women undergoing abortions yearly. As in many countries where abortion is restricted, women with money can still get safe abortion care, while poor women must resort to unsafe abortions. The end result is an estimated 200,000 women per year hospitalized due to complications of unsafe abortions, making unsafe abortion the third most common reason for obstetrical hospital admissions and one of the top causes of maternal mortality in the country.

A group representing Brazilian doctors, the Federal Council of Medicine, is now urging federal lawmakers to allow abortions on demand in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The group has noted the strong impact unsafe abortion has had on public health in Brazil and also pointed out that current abortion laws in the country “are inconsistent with humanitarian commitments” and act paradoxically against “social responsibility and international treaties signed by the Brazilian government.” The Council represents 400,000 physicians; let’s hope they get more attention than the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, which has already registered its distaste for this development.

No surgeon needed with new circumcision device

What do circumcisions have to do with abortion? Not a whole lot. But you may or may not know that circumcision does have a lot to do with reproductive justice for men and women living in countries with high HIV prevalence. Male circumcision, when performed by a skilled provider, reduces a man’s risk of acquiring HIV from an HIV-positive woman by about 60%. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work the other way; that is, circumcision of HIV-positive men does not protect their female partners. However, by protecting men from acquiring HIV, their partners are likewise protected. Because many women do not have control over condom use in their relationships, and because try as we might we are still nowhere near 100% condom use, offering voluntary circumcision to men is one of the most promising interventions available to decrease the spread of HIV.

Despite this, scale up of voluntary male circumcision has been slow. Although there are many reasons for this, the skilled health worker shortage in low-income countries is a major barrier to increased implementation of male circumcision. The New York Times reported this month on the PrePex device, an inexpensive tool that, after being left on for about one week, causes the foreskin to drop off. Best of all, applying it takes less time than surgery and no surgeon is needed; nurses and medical officers can learn to use the device quickly.

UN Commission on the Status of Women makes important strides

Although some activists feared that, as happened last year, no outcome document would be agreed upon after this year’s Commission due to attempts from conservative actors (such as the Holy See, Iran and Syria) to derail negotiations, in the end a document was produced (see a draft here).

In addition to reaffirming important previous international agreements made in Beijing and Cairo, the document condemns violence against women, calls upon states to protect women and girls from violence, promotes education for all as a human right, and recognizes the need for women to be fully integrated into economic and social life. It also states that women who have been raped have the right to emergency contraception and safe abortion where permitted by local laws.

I of course would have liked to see more about the right to contraception (which is a right for all women, not exclusively those who have been raped) and safe abortion regardless of context or local laws, but with conservative forces working for months behind the scenes to prevent any progress, I consider this a small step forward.