The pro-choice movement in the United States is at a critical crossroads. A new reproductive justice movement is emerging from the hardships endured by women in this country, one that will challenge the heated, sometimes violent suppression of women's dignity and human rights.
This year, more legislation to limit women's access to abortion and to legally separate fetuses from the pregnant women who sustain them was introduced in state legislatures than ever before - over 350 bills. Less commonly known is the fact that these laws also undermine the rights and health of pregnant women who wish to continue their pregnancies. According to Amnesty International, the United States spends more than any other country on health care, yet women here have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy-related complications than women in 40 other countries.
Poverty, geography, religion, politics all play a dominant role in determining who can and cannot get birth control, maternal health care and abortion services in the United States. Maternal care and abortion rights are intertwined--more than 60% of women who have abortions are already mothers. Despite this, a woman's human rights--her right to make medical decisions, right to religious freedom, right to personal dignity are all increasingly taking a back seat to efforts to re-criminalize abortion. It's harder to end a pregnancy than it was 20 years ago due to the barriers women must overcome and the fact that reproductive health clinics continue to close.
In states across the U.S., especially the Midwest and South, where women are earning less and less, the cost of an abortion is often out of reach. Add hours of travel, unpaid time off from work, childcare, and the obstacles to getting an abortion become significant. These same obstacles keep many women from getting the prenatal and postnatal care they deserve.
These states are also home to some of the most restrictive and punitive laws curtailing women's access to reproductive health care, and also claim some of the highest teen pregnancy and child poverty rates in the country. The Washington Post recently reported a rise in teen pregnancy rates, despite the $1.5 billion spent on abstinence-only programs
over the past decade.
Anti-abortion and anti-government activism is heated, high-profile, and often violent. This violence culminated in May 2009, when Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in Wichita, Kansas. His murder seems to have emboldened the anti-choice, anti-woman movement, while the women of these regions suffer the most.
This continuing campaign against women is unacceptable and un-American.
While state legislators push bills to penalize women who continue their pregnancies to term in spite of a drug problem, they do nothing to advocate for family and medical leave nor do they work to stop hospitals from banning women who have had previous cesarean surgery from delivering at their hospitals unless they agree to have another such surgery - whether they need it or not. The Federal outlook is no better. The new Congress is gearing up to host an unprecedented number of bills that go against women's dignity and
human rights. Unequivocally, we have more legislators who allow their opposition to abortion to trump the worth of women.
Following Roe in 1973, the U.S. saw an extraordinary improvement in public health and women's health with the legalization of abortion - but all this progress, access to maternity care and abortion care, is under increasing attack. This trend must be reversed and the rights of women must be respected. Doing so will result in more favorable health outcomes for women and their children.
What is emerging in 2010 is not our mothers' reproductive rights movement. This is a reproductive justice movement that addresses abortion care, maternity care, birthing rights and sex education in a holistic manner - each element part of a greater whole. This is a movement that recognizes that a woman's decision regarding pregnancy, no matter its outcome, is a moral and personal one.
The simple truth is that the same women who have abortions are already mothers or will most likely become mothers. It is imperative that we value these women, these mothers and ensure that they have full access to all of the maternal and reproductive health care services they need. America should do nothing less for the sake of women and their families.
Weekly Pulse: DIY Abortions on the Border, Pawlenty Screws MN on SexEd
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Women on along U.S.-Mexico border are buying black market misoprostol to induce abortions, according to a new report by Laura Tillman in the Nation. The drug is easily available over the counter in Mexico.
On Thursday, June 17th 2010, EMILY's List announced a new program called EMpower. We were filming WIN's 21st Annual Women Opening Doors for Women, where Stephanie Schriock, President of EMILY's List, announced the new program:
I remember that at the turn of the century (ha! I've always wanted to get to write that) it seemed like you couldn't read a news outlet anywhere that wasn't running articles on Islam 101 and the institution of Sharia law in some country. In one such article I read, a clerical commentator, iirc, was talking about why the veil was such a big deal to newly instituted Islamic governments.
He said, roughly, that it was because it was a lot easier to prove your piety by insisting that women cover themselves than it was to give up banking with interest.
I've always thought of that story when people go tediously on about the huge, innate cultural differences between Us and Them. It isn't only that women haven't been able to vote in the US for even a full 90 years, that we're only at about the 150 year mark for meaningful property rights for married women, that the states never ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, that women get paid less than men, etc. It's also because still today, our rights and health are often the first bone offered up on the altar of bipartisan consensus.
For the sake of people who believe that undifferentiated cell balls are people, the Democrats routinely ignore the interests of those who believe that women are people. Hence, the uterus remains the only organ that the state can require any adult living or dead to donate the use of for anyone else's sake.
The health financing reform fight has been no exception to this trend, and I don't know if I'm even capable of conveying how angry it makes me that Obama's signaling he's willing to gut reproductive health coverage in even private insurance plans, and almost certainly to exclude it from any public option, just so he can stake a claim to being the "last" president to deal with health care.
If you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. Probably. Unless you're a chick.
Public Christians in US politics can easily prove their piety to peers by punitively, and only, making life harder for women. They are not asked to prove moral fitness by driving out moneychangers, helping the poor, showing mercy, clothing the naked, exemplifying forgiveness, showing hospitality to strangers, being humble, keeping prayer private, sheltering the homeless, ministering to prisoners or feeding the hungry. Indeed, if indifferent cruelty is a spiritual virtue, then majorities in Congress are surely bound for heaven. Such as it would be. Whatever faith that is, it isn't in the Bible, a book I've had to read through cover-to-cover at least twice.
Which also therefore qualifies me to inform you that 'the b*tches got it coming' is neither in the Gospel, which isn't the law, nor the Constitution, which is. Read up.
Passing the Equal Rights Amendment is long overdue. So far, it has been ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states. Currently in the Florida Legislature there are two concurrent resolutions, one in the House (HCR 8001) and one in the Senate (SCR 362) for our state to ratify the amendment. It can pass this year! You can help make it happen by calling and/or emailing your state representative and senator to urge them to support it.
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