Red Envelopes for Life Don't Tell the Whole Story

The Red Envelopes for Life Project asks people to send empty red envelopes to the WHite House with the folliwing written on the outside:

"Dear President Obama:
This envelope represents one child who died in abortion. It is empty because that life was unable to offer anything to the world. Responsibility begins with conception."

Yes, every abortion takes away an irreplaceable child. I'm not disputing that part of it.

But I cannot help but wonder *whose* responsibility begins at conception?

Is all the responsibility going to be heaped upon the pregnant woman, before, during, and ever after birth, same patriarchal set up as usual?

Or is the child's father going to assume his share?

Will the extended family and friends assume *their* share?

Will the schools, workplaces, religious institutions, and other private/civil society institutions assume *their* share?

Most of all, will the larger society assume *its* monster's share of the responsibility? Will it make an all out public commitment to reducing abortion through comprehensive sex education, full access to all prevention options, universal health care, living wage, et al?

And anyway, even if we're just speaking of individual responsibility here--doesn't individual responsibility begin before conception?

Doesn't it also reside in becoming fully informed about sex and reproduction well before one is ever facing the prospect of sexual activity?

About the various prevention options and all their strengths and drawbacks?

About prenatal development?

And doesn't it reside with boys and men as with girls and women?

Don't boys and men have the responsibility to learn that women are fully human beings, not just objects for their gratification?

Don't males have the responsibility to be utterly conscious that their sperm might fuse with ova and result in children they must support before and after birth?

Don't males have the responsibility to do all they can to have mutually consenting, egalitarian, nonviolent relationships with women?

Doesn't the larger society at all levels have the responsibility to support men in unlearning power-over women and learning power-with?

The Red Envelopes only tell one part of the whole story.

For an Even Bolder Reproductive Health Agenda, Why Not.....

To mark International Women's Day, RH (Reproductive Health) Reality Check and UN Dispatch are teaming up for the salon A New Agenda for Girls's and Women's and Health and Rights.

The salon includes and responds to a (.pdf) report by Adrienne Germain of the International Women's Health Coalition. It urges and contemplates a much improved role for the United States in promoting global reproductive health.

Although the US government has yet to catch up to them, the salon commentators demonstrate just how far global reproductive health advocacy has progressed over the years and decades. No one reductively blames and scapegoats poor women of color's fertility for starvation and environmental destruction; quite the opposite. The agenda is broad and comprehensive and thoroughly feminist, solidly grounded in the human rights and needs of women and girls. In other words, it represents an aspiration to reproductive justice for all.

While Germain's report and all the salon panel members appear to take an abortion-rights stand, they do not fixate on that issue, let alone to the detriment of all the others. They attend to the "other" issues--measures which, incidentally, whether in effect or by intent have the power to reduce abortion, such as improved contraceptive access and expanded, comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention programs.

Former and longtime Catholics for a Free Choice leader Frances Kissling does pose this question of Germain's report: "Is This a 'Bold' Plan?" She concludes: "It is a good plan for the 20th century, but I say let's be really bold and move to the 21st."

Why doesn't she does consider Germain's a bold and current enough plan? In part:

Adolescent sexuality is not just "going to happen"; it has its place in adolescent life. Birth control and sex education for adolescents should not just be there as an antidote to the disease of adolescent sexuality but as an aid to healthy and responsible adolescent sexual expression. Ditto on abortion. I note the word appears once in Germain's agenda while we all know anti-abortion moralizing is one of the key problems in including abortion services and information in sexual and reproductive health programs.

I agree with Kissling that access to birth control and comprehensive sex education should not be simply looked upon in terms of a zeal to avert catastrophe. Of course it is essential for them to protect young people (and not-so-young people) against negative or undesired outcomes. But birth control access and sex education at the same time should at the same time actively address the very real and human--yet too often neglected-- need to cultivate the nonviolent giving and receiving of sexual pleasure.

But abortion? It's something different altogether. That pesky issue of taking early life--or potential life, in the estimation of some--is just too inescapable. Not to mention the reality that so many women resort to abortion because they have been denied sexual/reproductive choice to begin with...among other distressing facets of many women's abortion experiences.

It's not just that same-old same-old Bush administration "anti-abortion moralizing" that seeks to keep abortion advocacy out of a global reproductive health and rights agenda.


What would a really bold, 21st-century--and beyond--agenda be? One that joined both prochoice and prolife women's and girls' rights advocates in deliberately, consciously, seriously making abortion obsolete as possible, through social progress to alleviate its root causes.

This is precisely what Ms. Turn the Clock Forward evokes in the name of her blog.

So much that could be done in this area is going undone, overlooked, neglected.

Can we begin to imagine a world where abortion for the most part is regarded as a barbaric, violent, outmoded solution to human problems, where better solutions exist and are readily accessed?

I don't think it's a matter of whether that world can be made a reality. It's a matter of whether enough individuals and institutions will set their sights and their persistent deeds on it.

Who knew, forty years ago during my smoke-filled, ashtray-dumping childhood, that another life-denying practice--tobacco use--would be today so successfully reduced in the United States? Not simply through entreaties to individual behaviorial changes, but through institutional challenges to the tobacco industry, which are now being sought worldwide through instruments such as a global tobacco treaty.

So why not approach abortion in a parallel way, for real, not just in rhetoric? Dare I say that would make for a genuinely, radically bold 21st century reproductive justice agenda?

Planned Parenthood Controversy in Aurora, Illinois

Controversy and protest have accompanied Planned Parenthood's efforts to open a large new clinic in the far Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois. Again, I have impertinent questions and reflections that will likely make no "side" happy (and I am recuperated enough from six weeks of multiple disability flareup hell to offer them here, for whatever it is/isn't worth).

• Why did Planned Parenthood (apparently) try to "sneak" this clinic past a community it undoubtedly knew would, on a substantial scale, not be pleased at least with the abortion part of its offerings? Why couldn't it have instead gone with only its sex education, voluntary family planning, and other nonabortion/abortion-reducing services here--services which enjoy a far broader base of support? Especially since this move evidently compounds the perception in some quarters of Planned Parenthood and its abortion rights advocacy as racist, classist, "do-gooder" impositions...The Aurora area in recent years has grown increasingly less Caucasian, and now this attempt to bring an abortion-performing facility into the community against the wishes of many community members...
• Now, for decades I have personally known, and keep discovering, avowed prolifers--even those who engage in (nonviolent) protest against clinics, and even those who define themselves as politically and/or theologically conservative--who adopt "hard-to-place" children, take pregnant women into their own homes, and engage in many other actions that show they really mean it when they say they're prolife. But I happen to know that at least some of the antiabortion individuals and groups involved in the Aurora protests are not only protesting the clinic's attempt to offer abortions. They are lumping in the abortions with the genuine reproductive health services--same mistake as Planned Parenthood itself! And they are going beyond their right to their own personal religious beliefs, say, against contraception or nonmarital sex to denying the freedom of conscience and nonviolent action of anyone who happens to disagree with the convictions on these matters...and in the process, I think, they are undercutting their aspiration towards abortion abolition, especially in a pluralistic society.
• So far the protests have been described as peaceful. Wonderful if that means no homicides of clinic workers, supporters, patients. May that continue to be the case, whatever turns the fate of this clinic and the uproar about it take in the future. As necessary as this nonkilling is...nonviolence must also extend to the speech and intentions of all protestors towards women seeking abortions. It is decidedly NOT "prolife" to scream at women in tough situations that they are "harlots," "babykillers," et al while brandishing gorey fetus photos at them.... It is eminently prolife, I believe, to stand there calmly, nonjudgmentally, quietly but powerfully offering alternatives...offering to pay rent, give free child care or shelter or legal help with winning child support, even to adopt the very child endangered by abortion if it comes to that...whatever women may need.

Another thought: Although Planned Parenthood offers sliding scale contraception, and is certainly to be commended for that...low-income people in the US and elsewhere often do have other options for affordable family planning access, options that do not confuse a general "right" to abortion with genuine reproductive health care.

Expanded: Our Pages on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education & Male Responsibility

Please take a new look--or a look, if you haven't visited before--at the Nonviolent Choice Directory's page on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/completeeducation.html) We have added a lot of websites and little summaries and reviews. We have also added some on Male Responsibilitylately (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/maleresponsibility.html). Let us know what you think! Thank you.

We Welcome The Welcome

Ms. Turn the Clock Forward has graciously welcomed Nonviolent Choice to the blogosphere--and not only that, has encouraged helpful, feedback-giving visitors.

Now how can we argue with a jot or tittle of that?

Not only has at least one person out there noticed us, it's her. She is kewel, check her out. Ms. TCF bravely and diligently started and ran for many the late great email discussion group & website LeftOut: A Haven for Progressive Prolifers.

(and yes, we exist, no, we are not carefully contrived PR smokescreens over rank stealth misogynist-fascist authoritarian-religious agendas let alone the hapless dupes of said agendas, and no, we are not figments of our own purportedly unreality-based imaginations)

And now that blogs are The Thing, she has started a blog that among other virtues unequivocally advocates freedom of choice in family planning, LBGT rights, and comprehensive sex education. How can we not like her?

Hope our other (if any) readers will, too.