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.

Revisiting Some Poetry Against the Iraq War; A Contradiction That Catches at Me

Last night I was looking over a print anthology
of some of the over 21,000 poets who have contributed to Poets Against the War since 2003, as the Iraq War storm was gathering. (I'm one of those poets, though I'm not in the book.) Incredulous now, five years later, the utter obliviousness of the powers that be to all these prescient cries, and all the other eloquent voices of protest from around the world.

In her contribution to this book, the veteran feminist Marge Piercy excoriates the hypocrisy of an administration that proclaims a culture of life yet is so hellbent on destroying precious lives in Iraq:

Oh, we love fetuses now, we even/
dote on embryos the size of needle/
tips; but people, who needs them?/
Collateral damage. Babies, kids,/
goat and tabby cats, old women sewing/
old men praying, they'll become smoke/
and blow away like sandstorms/
of the precious desert covering treasure.

I share her outrage at this contradiction. Especially this week, when the ultraconservative antiabortionist Joe Scheidler claims that increasing social programs will not reduce abortion, and that prolifers who work with prochoicers on these abortion-reducing efforts are murderous betrayers of the unborn. I'd laugh if it were not for my weeping and "for shame!"ing.

But I wish I could ask Marge Piercy if the deepest and best and most shaking-up-for-the-good answer to this contradiction is to exclude embryos from the definition of "people"? What about (gulp!) defining them *in*?

Do unborn lives need to be treated as the "collateral damage" of the systematic violence against women that is the widespread denial of our right to make fully supported *nonviolent* sexual and reproductive choices--that makes disposable, "collateral damage" out of us, too?

Violence Against Women: A Frequent But Neglected Cause of Unintended Pregnancies

Many thanks to Esta Soler at RHRealityCheck for calling attention to the often-neglected role of sexual coercion and contraceptive sabotage against women in causing unintended pregnancies. And that means often, accelerated battery during pregnancy, and/or abortion.

Soler discusses the Know More campaign of the Family Violence Prevention Fund. According to an announcement on the Fund's website, the Know More campaign is "designed to create a dialogue about the birth control sabotage and reproductive coercion that many teens and young women face, which can result in unintended pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, miscarriage, infertility, coerced abortion, and a range of other serious health issues."

And if you are in the US, please respond to the campaign's action alert to "Help Abused Women who are Pregnant & Help Prevent Unintended Pregnancies".

Both prolifers and prochoicers have so often shared the assumption that women are free and equal actors in intimate male/female relationships. This has resulted in such toxic judgments as "Why are *you* so upset about your abortion, it was *your choice*!" and "What a feckless, irresponsible slut, she got pregnant when she could have just used birth control." And this assumption has really thwarted effective solutions to women's reproductive health and justice problems--including unintended pregnancy and abortion.

Prolife feminists have been speaking for centuries about violence against women as a major cause of unintended pregnancies and abortions..

For centuries, who has listened to us?

Better late than never for a more widespread public recognition of what is really going on with so many women who face horrific pregnancy dilemmas. We are all that much closer (one can only hope) to a world where women and children, the born and the unborn, are both alive and safe and well.

Quick Action Needed--CODEPINK Petition re: the Iraq War & Violence Against Iraqi Women

This is on every short notice, but...speaking of violence against women, please endorse this International Women's Day petition from the US women's peace camapign CODEPINK:

As you read this, women in Iraq live in a Hell we have created.

In Central Iraq, 91.8% of women polled by Women for Women International say that violence against women is increasing. 74.5% of Iraqi women avoid leaving their homes. 63.2% have regularly not sent their children to school. 65.3% report that US security forces are only making security worse. One woman who was interviewed commented, "They gave us freedom and they took from us security, but if I have to choose, I will choose safety and security."

We cannot allow this to continue.

As we gear up to honor International Women's Day on March 8, let us remember the dire situation of our Iraqi sisters. Let us use our voices to make their voices heard.

On March 11, we will deliver a letter to every woman Member of Congress. We will provide them with chilling information about the struggle of Iraqi women living under occupation, and press them to take supportive action in the next few weeks by voting to fund human needs, not warfare, in Iraq, and legislate the return of all the troops and contractors. Please add your name to our letter here.

The letter will include the Women for Women International report on the status of Iraqi women. We hope you will read it yourself to learn more about the tragic circumstances they are living in.

Endorse UNIFEM's "Say NO to Violence Against Women" Petition

UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, has launched a global petition, "Say NO to Violence Against Women."

As well as being a major, widespread human rights violation in and of itself, violence against women is a major cause of abortion worldwide. It often begins or escalates during pregnancy. Women may be outright and directly forced to abort their pregnancies, or be subjected to so many miseries, they cannot envision a different way.

And violence against women is a major reason why women are deprived of their right to make nonviolent choices, such as whether or not to have sex, and with whom, and whether or not to prevent conception, and how. Violence against women violates women's (as well as unborn children's right) to bodily integrity, and often violates women's (as well as unborn children's) right to life itself.

If you are a pregnant--or nonpregnant, for that matter--woman who has been or is subjected to violence, please visit our Mother & Child Health page(direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html) . It lists sources of help for problems with Domestic Violence/Abuse (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html#dv.html).

Our Pregnancy Prevention page (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html)offers resources on Rape & Incest Treatment & Prevention (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html#rape).

And of course, one of the deepest solutions for violence against women resides in greater Male Resonsibility (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/maleresponsibility.html).

Abortion & Women's Mental Health

The PBS series "NOW" just broadcast a segment on abortion and women's mental health. It left me, personally, feeling saddened and frustrated by the injurious, counterproductive ways that both the prolife and prochoice movements treat this issue. (Precisely why the Nonviolent Choice Directory doesn't yet list any postabortion healing resources...still looking for and weighing the possibilities. Any ideas, anyone? Please share.)

• On the prochoice side: The tendency to disbelieve, even dismiss or silence or disparage, women who themselves perceive and describe their abortions as devastating, violent losses...as if such women were by definition "babies," or pawns of the patriarchy, or hypocrites, or biters of the prochoice feminist hands that supposedly fed them their greatest & most foundational of rights (scapegoating, prochoice variant).
• On the prolife side: The tendency to link post-abortion recovery programs to the attainment of specific, narrow religious or political outcomes that may not serve the healing processes of many women who seek healing--and (scapegoating, prolife variant) to cast abortion as an individual women's "personal sin," as if the abject failure of the larger society to support her (and her fetus, once conceived) with nonlethal options could not possibly have anything to do with the fact of the abortion.

Just as not all combatants react the same way to war, not all women who have abortions undergo a debilitating psychological crisis afterwards. On the other hand, again just like combat, abortion is not exactly fun for anybody. And I suspect that, just as with the mental health effects of war, the repercussions of abortion often go unrecognized and unhealed because the practice and scientific research on it are so embroiled in all sorts of political interests that fear, in their own different ways, for their own different reasons, the whole of the truth about it.

For so many women, of all kinds, to their own understanding, abortion is hell. Like war. And why shouldn't we listen to and and take them at their word--just like we should listen to and take deeply suffering combatants--the very people our collective failures and violations sent into battle-- at their word?

This doesn't in and of itself settle, of course, the ethics and law of abortion. But it counts. It counts a lot. Every story counts--including the ones that other people want least to hear, the ones that don't fit the established, rigid ideological parameters. Indeed, I'd venture: those are precisely the stories that have the most power to transform political and other human systems for the better.

From my vantage point, the question is not so much, "Whose side wins this one?"

Rather:

• What can we all do to ensure relief for the root causes of abortion, so that women (and their children) stop getting punished for our own failures of help and care?
• What can we all do to best promote the healing of those for whom prevention is already too late?

Amnesty International & Abortion (Part Two)

Just like Cardinal Martino...Amnesty International is not above and beyond criticism for its new policy on abortion, a definite move away from its previous neutrality.

It would have been wiser to stay neutral and redoubled its efforts to reduce abortion through abolishing violence against women & other root causes--measure that represent considerable areas of common ground between many, many prolife and prochoice individuals.

I say this in a spirit of constructive criticism towards an organization I dearly love--I've been an action alerts responder, a letter writer for Amnesty campaigns, for over twenty years now (and a member when I could afford the dues.) In my little ways I've tried to back up the organization in its remarkably broad fight for human rights, on issues ranging from the death penalty to rape as a weapon of war to hate crimes against LGBT persons to the violation of environmental activists' civil liberties.

I say this as someone who worked alongside with other consistent life ethic-advocating, progressive & feminist prolife members, joined at some points by prochoice members who foresaw the policy change's potentially alienating consequences, to challenge the undemocratic, nontransparent process by which the decision was proposed & moved through the organization. Who personally witnessed how those efforts were systematically fended off.

Because the higher-ups wouldn't listen, I post here something I wrote to Kate Gilmore, Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International.

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Casting the issue in this overly simplistic woman-versus-fetus manner, in my opinion and the opinions of many human rights activists *undermines* Amnesty's credibility as a voice for women's human rights and human rights in general.

Why *must* resistance to the received definition of abortion (to whatever extent) as a women's human right *necessarily* entail indifference and silence towards such evils as the rape of women whether in wartime or within their own families, the punishment and execution of women for induced or even suspected induced abortions, the abandonment of women to horrible suffering and death from abortion complications?

I personally have protested and worked a long time against ALL these evils, for example rape and the stigmatization of women who have suffered rape, at every level of society from my own family to the global, and will continue to do so as long as I have breath and muscle power.

After all it would be monstrously hypocritical and counterproductive to defend unborn children's lives without simultaneously defending the lives of women and all other already-born human beings.

And I know from long experience, there are ways to challenge such atrocities against women without necessarily having to define abortion as a women's human right. And I know from long experience that I am not alone in this, that I'm in good company.

The reason I sent the IEC members [International Executive Committee, the Amnesty officials ultimately responsible for the policy change--Marysia] an electronic copy of the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition was to document the number, and diversity of genuine progressives/feminists who have powerfully articulated and acted upon these ways.

I and many others severely question the official line that Amnesty decided this policy change in a transparent, democratic way. That's not what I, and many other members with a range of opinions on abortion, have witnessed with our own eyes and ears.

The resulting decision--to adopt a policy that challenges violence against women by defining abortion as a human right instead of remaining neutral on the contentious matter of whether or not it is one---instead of sticking to while greatly expanding other, common-ground ways to challenge violence against women, ways that, incidentally, serve to *reduce* pressures upon women to have abortions, legal or illegal--only confirms our skepticism.

Some of us are leaving the organization and working for human rights through other venues, some of us are resorting to the resistance strategy called "defection in place." Either way, Amnesty has not heard the last of our protests.

Amnesty International & Abortion (Part One)

A Vatican official, Cardinal Martino, just poured gasoline on an already quite gasoline-fed fire by demanding that all Roman Catholics refuse to support Amnesty International because of its recent decision to define abortion in certain situations as a woman's right, in contrast to its previous neutral stance.

Now this is an interfaith/nonsectarian website, that welcomes visitors and contributors of all faiths and none....so, please, no one take this assessment as any blanket condemnation or endorsement of Roman Catholics or their religious faith. I am simply focusing here on whether this was a constructive response or not. In my opinion it wasn't.

If he didn't like the policy change, he could have done wonders by placing his criticism in the context of praise and acknowledgment of the many, many things that Amnesty International does which, to the best of my understanding, are prolife according to the beliefs of all manner of Catholics (as well as people from all religions & none.) Such as protesting against forced abortion, other forms of violence against women, the death penalty, and torture, to name a few.

(And Nota Bene: opposing abortion is not a solely or exclusively Catholic endeavor, it crosses all manner of nonstereotypical lines including religious ones.)

He could have done even more wonders by insisting that the Roman Catholic Church at every level respond to the Amnesty policy change in an even more deeply radical way. A way that I think (but what do I know??) would seriously engage that whole pesky "What Would Jesus Do?" question....

He could have demanded that the Catholic Church, even as--no, because, it disagreed with Amnesty on this one point--- respond by fighting profoundly, thoroughly, energetically against violence towards women and the other misogynist injustices that cause the abortions that Amnesty now defines as under the rubric of human rights...even cooperating with Amnesty upon these areas of common ground.

He could have worked even more wonderful wonders by coming up with a specific, fully funded, worldwide action plan to accomplish just this way of preventing those very abortions.

He's a big wig, he gets a global hearing---so why didn't he use this opportunity to make a genuine difference more constructively?

Sigh...[Wailing, weeping, & gnashing of teeth.]


To evalute for yourself the man in his own words:
http://ncregister.com/site/article/2916

End the Femicide in Ciudad Juárez , Mexico

Since 1993, over 450 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez on the Mexico-US border, and about the same number have disappeared. The crimes have gone to Chihuahua City as well.

Mexican authorities have persistently refused to properly investigate these killings and disappearances and bring the perpetrators--likely including a serial killer or killers-- to justice.

Many familiar with the situation suspect that key officials may have ties to the lucrative sex trafficking trade, and/or are under the sway of American companies that set up factories just across the border to increase their profits and evade laws on fair wages and worker safety.

Indeed a number of the victims--all very poor women--struggled for their own survival and that of their loved ones by working in these factories or in prostitution.

These were all precious human lives with faces and names, who left loved ones behind. And more precious human lives with faces and names will be at stake, there will be more grieving survivors, if nothing is done.

Amigos de Las Mujeres de Juárez (Friends of the Women of Juárez) is a nonprofit whose mission is to:

Work toward ending crimes against women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City and provide financial, logistical, and emotional support to the families of the Cd. Juárez and Chihuahua City serial-killing victims and the Casa Amiga rape and abuse crisis center in Cd. Juárez.

Please support their work! One thing you can do is purchase fundraising postcards, "Action Cards," from them that show pictures and names of victims. On the back of each postcard is a letter to Mexican authorities demanding justice.

Amnesty International USA also offers this:

Take Action for the Women of Juarez
http://www.amnestyusa.org/Bordertown/Take_Action_for_the_Women_of_Juarez/page.do?id=1101544&n1=2&n2=22&n3=795

"Not Traditional"

Sacred Circle, a national resource center for healing violence against Native women, often insists:


Violence Against Native Women Is Not Traditional.


Indeed, though few Euro-American feminists realize it today, the women's rights movement in this country, including the struggle to abolish and heal violence against women, has direct roots in at least one group of First Nations, the Haudenosaunee ("People of the Long House") Six Nations Confederacy of Upstate New York (the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora).

Anglo early feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both astounded and inspired by the much greater freedoms that Haudenosaunee women enjoyed within their own cultures, not the least of which was freedom from sexual coercion.

To learn more about Native American beliefs in everyone's right to bodily integrity, and about this underrecognized origin of US feminism, you can:

--Read ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, which thoroughly documents these matters.

--Visit the website of Sacred Circle and order from their publications catalog, which offers educational materials for both Native and non-Native people who want to both understand and take action on the current horrific problems of violence against Native women.

Violence Against Native American Women

The freedom to live without sexual assault is one of the most basic nonviolent choice rights.

Amnesty International USA recently published the report Maze of Injustice--the Failure to Protect Indigenous Women Against Sexual Violence in the USA. It found that Native American women were 2.5 times more likely than other American women to have sexual violence inflicted on them. Yet perpetrators of violence against Native women were far less likely to be brought to justice.

Why is this so? Along with the pervasive denial in Anglo-dominant US culture that women are human, Native American women are struggling with the fallout from centuries of colonial occupation and racism.

To read the Amnesty report and take action:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/Womens_Human_Rights/Join_Voices_with_Native_American_and_Alaska_Native_Women/page.do?id=1021163&n1=3&n2=39&n3=1410

The Amnesty materials include links to Native American shelters and efforts to end violence against women. Here are two ways you can aid their work most effectively:

1. Donate generously and regularly to one or more of these courageous but chronically underfunded organizations.
2. Write your representatives (Amnesty has a sample letter) to demand an increase in funds under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).