Progressive Prolife Thinking?

This article talks about how some Catholic & Evangelical abortion opponents want to keep legislation to help already pregnant women utterly separate from bills to promote contraceptive access...and then, it is not stated outright, they fail to support the latter:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/06/29/as-white-house-readies-abortion-plan-packaging-emerges-as-major-issue.html

Oh, I get it. They're separating out the Madonnas from the Whores!

The very same dividing up of womanhood that has caused many an abortion throughout history, on the part of women who have feared being hounded & ostracized & even outright lynched as Whores.

More on Tim Ryan's Expulsion from Democrats for Life

Pro Life, Pro Contraception, Pro Tim Ryan

Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options

The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.

The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.

You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.

Take a Stand for Pregnant Women & Their Children

Pesticides *still* endanger pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies. Please read the personal testimonies and take action here, with the United Farmworkers union:

http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej

When "Moral Purity" Is Valued Over Helping Women & Children

Rep. Tim Ryan was just ousted from the advosory board of Democrats for Life. The reason? Because he dares to insist that contraception is necessary to reducing abortion.

Please send your messages of protest to info@democratsforlife.org

If this happens in an organization that bills itself as progressively prolife--what future is there for the prolife movement? It is so out of touch with the reproductive justice concerns that women live with every day.

Especially when eight in ten people in the US who identify as prolife also advocate women's access to contraception.

So why doesn't the prolife movement--even organizations that say they differ from the mold-- include or represent us and our plans for reducing abortion?

Early Feminists & Reducing Abortion Today

A contribution to the new On Common Ground section of RHRealityCheck:


What the First Wave of Feminism Can Teach the First Wave of Common Ground

A Sort of Copycat Crime?

Yesterday, just a day after abortion provider George Tiller was gunned down at church, Private William Long, a 23 year old military recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, was shot to death. Private Quinton Ezeagwula, age 18, was wounded.

May William Long rest in peace, and Ezeagwula recuperate.

A suspect was taken into custody and charged with the shootings: Abdulhakim Muhammad, a 23 year old African American man who converted to the violent distorting strain within Islam--that does not at all speak for Muslims who know that "Islam" means "peace." Muhammad pleaded not guilty and said he killed the soldiers to retaliate for the killings of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it a mere coincidence that this happened right after the killing of Tiller? Or did it give the perpetrator the boost and sense of endorsement he needed to actually commit a deed he had been heading towards for a while already?

Like Scott Roeder, who has been charged with Tiller's killing, Muhammad was already been on the radar of law enforcement. So, once again, how exactly did someone with a known violent, terrorist ideology, under the scrutiny of legal authorities, get his hands on a gun and bullets?

I too am heartsick over the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who have died so unnecessarily in these wars. I am heartsick over the young African American men from my neighborhood who join the military because they feel it's their only or their best choice...and maybe Muhammad is someone who hit the very same skids that afflict a lot of young Black men as they are confronted with the harsh societal realities that shut them out of meaningful opportunities and brand them as violent criminals...

But as A.J. Muste insisted: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." Attacking military recruiters is no answer to the problems of war and racism, and attacking abortion providers is no answer to abortion and women's dearth of choices, either.

An Open Letter to the Prolife Movement, from a Prolifer

The fatal shooting today of Dr. George Tiller is just plain horrific and wrong.

Absolutely *no* human being deserves to be shot down in cold blood...let alone in a house of worship, which should be a place of safety, peace, and refuge for *all* God's children who seek it there...no matter what they do for a living and no matter how objectionable we may find their means of livelihood.

*No* human being should usurp that power of life and death over another.

There is *no* justification or extenuating circumstances for this murder of a fellow member of humankind.

May peace and healing come to George Tiller's loved ones.

Today, and every day, each and every individual and group that identifies with the word "prolife" needs to ask, from a stance of complete humility and openness rather than hard headed and hearted defensive arrogance, questions such as this.

--Have I/we ever said or done anything that demonizes anyone who disagrees with me/us on the issue of abortion?

--Am I/are we willing to humbly learn from prochoicers what they deem to be demonizing words and deeds against them--quite independently of the question of which side is "right" or "wrong" about abortion?

--Have I/we ever failed to challenge anyone who agitates for the killing of abortion providers?

--Have I/we taken a strong, outapoken, unapologetic, unceasing stance against the killing of abortion providers, instead of just saying and hiding behind "well, real prolifers don't do that, and we're real prolifers"?

--Have I/we ever said or done anything that even sounds like it gives justification to the homicide of abortion providers, like "well, so few of them have been killed compared to the number of babies they've killed"--as if their relative fewness somehow makes their forcibly cut-short lives and their unjust deaths somehow unimportant?

--Have I/we ever taken positive steps to alleviate the causes and sources of violence against abortion providers?

--Have I/we ever reached out to prochoicers and tried to work cooperatively and humbly with them on preventing further violence against abortion providers?


Coming up with ethically robust answers to these questions is literally a matter of life and death.

Absolutely Horrified

(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )

I just heard that George Tiller, the Kansas physician known for providing late-term abortions, was shot to death today.

As much I disagree with the work of abortion providers, such news is absolutely horrifying. Another life squandered by gun violence--and in the same of "prolife," of all things!!

Whoever committed this crime-it makes no sense to call yourself "prolife" and then gun down another human being in cold blood. Any more than it would make sense to oppose the war by opening fire on a recruiting center or military base.

My condolences to all who knew Dr. Tiller, and I will continue to pray for the safety of all clinic workers, to work for gun control, to speak up when I hear antiabortionists demonizing and dehumanizing their "enemies," who belong to the same humankind no matter what deep disagrements exist.

Gun Control Is a Reproductive Justice Issue: Some Thoughts for Mother's Day

(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )


It happened again last week in my neighborhood, just a few blocks from where my family lives. I didn't hear the shots or the screams this time, but other times, I have. This past week, it was in broad daylight. The toll was one dead, one wounded--both young Black men.

And not a word about their fates in the big media, though certainly there was among the distressed neighbors. Including the children who grow up here knowing every day what children shouldn't have to think about too much: that their lives could be cut short on purpose by someone else in an irrevocable instant. A sweet-faced young man my daughter grew up with died from a gunshot to the back of his head. He left a baby girl behind. As much as for him, we wept to see his overwhelmed parents, family, and friends at the funeral.

I could take you on a sad pilgrimage around my neighborhood and show you all the telephone poles, corners, stretches of sidewalk, and weedy vacant lots where fellow human beings, mostly young Black men, saw the last of this Earth because of gun violence. There is nothing left in these places to mark their premature and abrupt departures except for the sorrowful and outraged hearts of those who pass by and remember what happened there and there and there.

Every year in the United States, gun violence kills 30,000 human beings and injures another 70,000. Gun rights advocates like to say, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." So why is it that I've never met anyone in my neighborhood who agrees with this statement? So many of these killings and woundings happen regularly in neighborhoods like mine, to low-income people of color, often Black and Brown young men.

In other words, it's not the same world most gun rights advocates inhabit. They tend to be majority-white and far more prosperous and able to pay for lobbyists. I am speaking of those who manufacture and profit from the gun trade, and the hunters who (in this country anyway) kill animals primarily for sport and not substinence.

In casting the gun issue as a matter of individual rights and responsibilities, the gun lobby only fuels the criminalization and scapegoating of impoverished people of color, especially young men. Framing the issue this way has an unmistakable implication: better-off white people must know how to handle their guns responsibly, and low-income people of color must not--why else would there be so many more gun crimes and deaths in *those* neighborhoods? *Those* people got what was coming to them, didn't they?

This framing of the gun issue prevents Americans from taking up the collective responsibilities we have too long failed: our collective responsibilities to structurally alleviate poverty, classism, and racism.

These include our collective responsibilities to challenge the patterns of underregulated or unregulated marketing and distribution which have allowed the gun industry to systematically insinuate its way into inner-city neighborhoods. Geoffrey Canada, a noted child welfare activist from the Black community, has spoken up about the gun industry's conscious strategies for moving into the inner-city once it had saturated and achieved the maximum profit it could from the "sportsmen's" market.

In the inner city, it's human beings who get hunted with guns now, and in most cases legal guns. 88% of guns used in crimes were bought quite legally from the rampantly unregulated sectors of the gun market. And US-made guns flood the international trafficking in small arms, which is responsibile for the high rate of gun violence in other beset places populated by poor human beings of color, like the favelas of Brazil.

Every single human being killed or hurt by gun violence made it onto this Earth in the first place because a woman carried him/her for nine months, birthed him/her, and in most cases raised him/her. And many victims of gun violence are, or were, parents themselves.

The right to raise our children in a safe, healthy environment is a core demand of reproductive justice. Not surprisingly, this demand arises from the very communities of color most devastated by gun violence. As well as an obvious pro every life concern, gun control is a reproductive justice issue.

Guns rights advocates are also the children of mothers, and many are parents themselves. Aside from the gun makers and those who hunt animals for sport, some honestly believe that the unregulated right of gun ownership is essential to protect themselves and their families.

What if they could see how much the lack of gun control undermines the ability of people in neighborhoods like mine to protect ourselves and our children? What if they could glimpse what we already have learned too often, the hard way: that guns constitute the falsest of hopes for personal security? That widescale disarmament is ultimately the best way to keep every mother's son or daughter, every parent, every human being safe and healthy as can be?

Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine's Hundredth Anniversary Bash

(crossposted at Marysia's RHReality Check Diary)

And we weren't gate crashers, either. We were there as part of the festivities, sometimes recognized, sometimes not, sometimes welcomed, sometimes not.

For starters, take two of the speakers on the official program, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and political scientist Stephen Zunes. Most of the event wasn't about abortion, and these two activists were both present to speak on issues other than abortion (yes, progressive prolifers *really do* care about a whole slew of social justice issues). But their respective stances on that particular subject are a matter of public knowledge.

Anyone with Internet access can look up Marcy Kaptur's legislative record. Including her good record on labor, LGBT rights, family planning, and maternal/child health and welfare, among other recognizable-to-all progressive concerns.

Stephen supports the mission of Consistent Life, an international network of over 200 pro-every life organizations (including Nonviolent Choice). With peace psychologist Rachel MacNair, he co-edited the recent anthology Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War

Rachel and I are friends who go way, way back and have long histories of our own with Consistent Life. We team-staffed a literature table for CL in the exhibit hall at the Progressive Magazine celebration. Our table featured a large, eye-catching banner: "Prolifers for Peace, Peaceworkers for Life."

And who was the very first person to approach us, when we were still setting the table up? A young man who told us he was prolife, but did not feel free to disclose this opinion in progressive circles. Throughout the day, we met a number of pro-every life women and men who also gladly outed themselves to us.

And quite a few of the people who stopped by were prochoicers who said lovely, hospitable things like, "I may not agree with you about everything, but I'm glad you're here" and "I like your kind of prolife." We had good, respectful dialogues about relieving the root causes of abortion as well as better understanding our areas of disagreement. Including not one but two long conversations with an abortion clinic escort.

Rachel and I enjoyed the overall positive climate of these exchanges. In our long pasts with this sort of thing, we have both routinely experienced some rather difficult difficulties at literature tables. Yes, not everyone of the prochoice persuasion would do this, to be sure...But numerous prochoicers have quite rudely and precipitously mistaken us for some pretty horrid things that just a little polite conversation would quickly reveal us to be decidedly not.

No doubt prochoicers who staff literature tables are also quite familiar with this sort of abruptly unloosed torrent of verbiage that leaves not one unflooded space for response or engagement or self-defense...and it's not much fun, is it?

Although, especially later, it may afford some consolations of comedy. Rachel and I still laugh about the woman who long ago ran up and sternly ordered her, "Stop taking orders from the Pope!" When in fact Rachel is a dedicated Quaker, and the Society of Friends does not even have ministers, for Christ's sake! because that mess is just too durn hierarchical and authoritarian.

We didn't know quite what to expect at the Progressive Magazine event. But not a single person came up to our table and issued one of those dreaded adhominem rants, or scolded us along the lines of "What the hell are *YOU PEOPLE* doing here? Get the f*** out!" Which has also happened, far more than once. That is, when we haven't been excluded before we even had a chance to get in the door...

That's progress among progressives, for real.

Now, a few folks did raise eyebrows at our banner or shake their heads and walk briskly away. And once, when I was by myself at the table, I did distinctly see and hear a pair of conferencegoers stop dead in their tracks, proclaim "Yikes!" and turn aboutface in their tracks...

As if there were not a quite involved and invested sentient being (me!) taking all this in just inches away. And a sentient being at the ready to make eye contact and smile (sincerely, not fakily) at them in passing, at the very least, and if they allowed, to ask them, quite seriously, what specifically was behind that "Yikes!"

I did want to know, I did want to listen, but if people don't give you an opening...But any of these responses sure beat the bad old unreality-based ad hominem rant.

However, something quite troubling did happen to Rachel, after I had taken my leave of the conference and its nonproletarian-priced celebrity fundraising events on my customary posh, high-roller mode of transit, the Greyhound bus.

Rachel attended a bigwig panel discussion on the future of the progressive movement. During the question/comment period, she pointed out the existence of progressive prolifers. She recommended that the progressive movement as a whole work with us to reach people who otherwise might not give progressive values and politics any serious hearing.

Now, Rachel says she wasn't going on any longer, and probably was going on shorter, than others who lined up behind the questioners' mikes. I did attend previous panel discussions, and there sure were a lot of talkative folks with strong opinions who leapt up behind those mikes the instant they were switched on.

But the bigwigs on the panel grumbled that they could see where Rachel was going with this (they could? how did they know before she went there?) There amidst the advocates of free speeach, she was summarily cut off. "Free speech for me but not for thee..."

Then the panel bigwigs unleashed a number of statements Rachel had no chance to publicly respond to. One panel member, for example, criticized the Pope's statements about condoms in Africa--as if "prolife" meant you automatically bowed in obedience to those words, of course.

And no one openly challenged the censorship dynamic here. Indeed, there was apparently a lot of applause for it.

Rachel tells me what else she would have said if her mike had not been cut off:

"I would have responded by re-iterating and bringing [the panelists] back to the point I was actually making about outreach, rather than responding to non-sequiturs. There were several bizarre points made that I could have taken issue with, had I had all afternoon, but I would have kept on track because the session was about the future of the progressive movement and I was keeping on track even if they weren't."

(Now me, I would've explained how those "bizarre points" were nonsequiturs, *then* returned to the matter of outreach. But that's me.)

On the other hand, some women in the audience approached Rachel afterwards and shared their own reproductive challenges. They quickly grasped that hers was not prolife-as-expected, and they all ended up hugging each other.

But why were complex, nuanced, empathetic, very human, small-scale interactions like these--the kinds of exchanges we had both experienced elsewhere in the conference--not reflected in the overt, bigwig-marshalled, publicly unchallenged group dynamics that cut off Rachel's mike?

Like Rachel would tell you if she had half a chance--that question matters to the future of the progressive movement, to the hundred more years we wish the dear old Progressive Magazine.

Another Reason to Go Veg

Daily Grist reports that the current epidemic/prospective pandemic of swine flu could be the direct result of industrial meat production. The US company Smithfield runs giant hog farms in Mexico, including some in the area where the infections in humans apparently began.

This isn't surprising. The pigs are crammed together in such a way that rampant diseases are pretty much inevitable. Same way that the global trafficking in poultry animals is implicated in outbreaks of avian flu.

One more reason, of many, to go veg: to refuse complicity in creating misery and death for so many sentient beings, human and other-than-human.

If you are thinking about going veg and aren't sure where and how to get started, please visit the Vegetarian Resource Group and GoVeg.com.

Please Take the 50 Million Missing Campaign's Gender Survey

You may remember our interview on Female Genocide in India with Rita Banerji of the 50 Million Missing Campaign.

Rita just asked me to pass on this message.

Our gender survey for the 50 Million Missing campaign will close in another month or so and we need lots more respondents before then. So could I please ask you for help to circulate this link? Just forward it with a note to other people in your
email list.

We are telling people:
1. Not to give their names (it's anonymous).
2. Don't think too much. Just answer.
3. Takes less than 4 minutes.
4. Don't forget to click 'submit' at the end.

Here's the link:

http://www.my3q.com/home2/252/the50millionmissing/survey.phtml

Please circulate. Put on Facebook too.

Thanks much

Rita
Hope our readers will take the survey. By the way, congratulations to Rita for the positive reviews of her now globally distributed book Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies.

Reducing Overconsumption on Earth Day and Every Day

(crossposted at Marysia's RHRealityCheck Diary)

I am glad to see this article on RHReality Check, pointing out the many points of connection between environmental and reproductive justice:

A Cleaner, Greener Planet

And of course one article can't cover all the grounds of this enormous subject, so I'd like to raise some more relevant issues.

When it comes to reproductive and environmental responsibility, many people is the wealthier countries think of the responsibility to limit their own reproduction for the sake of the planet.

Now I'm not going to argue for one minute that the Earth has an endless carrying capacity, or that people shouldn't voluntarily choose to limit their conceptions. But I do stand in solidarity with women from the Two Thirds World who finally were able to change the terms of the debate at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo.

Two Thirds World activists have shown that it is not just the total number of people that threatens the environment, but the patterns of grotesque overconsumption in the wealthier countries. They have argued that the most important thing is to alleviate child and maternal mortality and ensure educational and work opportunities for women as well as access to voluntary contraception--and population size will take care of itself.

One key way for people in the wealthier countries to reduce their overconsumption is to forego (or at least minimize) their use of animal products. Many are beginning to ask questions about the use of such products in the manufacture of contraceptive and safer sex items, and to demand--and even get--contraceptives and safer sex items that are free of animal products, or at least products from animal carcasses. The Glyde Corporation, with its line of vegan-friendly items, is a leader in this regard. Please see the left side of this blog and also the Nonviolent Choice Directory Mall for (nonprescription) vegetarian and vegan birth control and safer sex items.

But the largest, single most decisive step people can take is to become vegan or vegetarian, for their own health, the health of other human beings, and of course for the sake of our fellow sentient beings who get killed for meat.

In the US especially, enormous quantities of energy and land are hijacked and blasted with endocrine-disrupting pesticides to feed meat animals crammed into factory farms. Which in turn create environmentally devastating pollution, as shown on the recent PBS "Frontline" special by reporter Hedrick Smith, "Poisoned Waters."

Growing at least part of one's own food organically and very locally is another option, even if one has very little available land But the average front lawn in the US can be through rather easy-to-learn, low-tech methods farmed to grow enough produce for a family of four for one year. And urban apartment dwellers often can join or start community gardens--that's how my own family has dealt with the problems of no yard.



To learn about these options, please visit:

Go Veg (includes Veg Starter Kit)

Grow Biointensive

as well as our Directory sections on Eco-Friendly Living and Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating

The net result can only be better for everyone's lives and health, including our reproductive health.

"Ecofeminismo pró-vida"--Prolife Ecofeminism Interview--Now in Brazilian Portuguese

Thanks to Caio Capelari for translating my National Catholic Reporter interview into Brazilian Portuguese. I didn't even have to ask him! I would imagine that the prolife ecofeminist ethic is one that appeals to many in Brazil.

For those of you who want to read the original interview in English, please disregard previous links to it, as the NCR Online site has reorganized. The interview is now at:

http://ncronline.org/news/ecology/pro-life-eco-feminists-work-consist-ethic-life

Unfortunately, when the site was reorganized, a lot of articles, including this one, apparently lost the associated comments, including my comments in response to questions about legality/illegality and abortion.