Nonviolent Choices for All Our Lives

The Nonviolent Choice Directory is now a project of All Our Lives. We will keep doing the same things-just better.

Please Try Our Directory Again

Our Directory at www.nonviolentchoice.info has been inaccessible during the past few days to some visitors. If that's you, please try again--looks like the problem is resolved.

Apologies--Downed Server

Apologies if you have been trying to access our Directory and have not been able. The server appears to be down. We are so sorry. If you need anything, please ask here in the comments (you can do so anonymously if you like.)

Our Maternal Care Plea in UNFPA Blog

The UNFPA blog Conversations for a Better World has published our It Affects Us All: Maternal Health Care.

Want to Affirm *All* Our Lives?

All Our Lives is a group and a movement that Nonviolent Choice heartily endorses. Not hard to understand why:

"Nobody is defending women's right to make all non-violent choices about their sexual and reproductive lives without advocating for abortion as well. All Our Lives will change that. Our mission is to model a woman-centric, non-violent and inclusive approach to issues of health, sexuality, and reproduction."

Please take part. A good place to start: the All Our Lives Facebook Group .

Help Christine Taylor

Christine Taylor is a Iowa woman with two already-born children and one still unborn. Although the charges were dropped, she was accused of attempting feticide after she fell down the stairs. An example of how laws supposedly intended for fetal protection can backfire and criminalize women in difficult situations.

Taylor and her children are under a great deal of stress and have very limited support resources. She was recently a robbery victim. A local childbirth advocate and midwifery advocate is gathering donations to help the family.

Please help if you can!

Black Genocide?

Antiabortion billboards in Atlanta are occasioning controversy. They declare: "Black children are an endangered species."

That gets my attention. I am white, and there is only so much I am qualified to say on the matter, I cannot and never will be able to speak as a Black person myself. At the same time, my family is interracial, my grandbaby is of African descent... And everywhere in our majority Black neighorhood, children are indeed endangered, in more ways that I can describe here. So I do have something to say, for whatever it's worth.

The people behind these billboards speak of Black women's significantly higher abortion rates as part of a deliberate, carefully targeted genocide, one that they sometimes link to contraception.

Loretta J. Ross of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective counters: “The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ’20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them...Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works.”

So, who's right here?

Loretta Ross points out something quite vital but so often lost on antiabortionists who makes these claims. Although there is a long shameful history of fertility control coerced upon Black women, there is a world of difference between that and personal and community-driven demands for voluntary family planning.

Coerced contraception is violence, yes, but the violence is in the forcing. Voluntary contraception prevents a prenatal life rather than stopping one--so what quarrel should prolifers have with it?

Prolifers are far better prepared to reduce the abortion rate if they recognize and honor these demands for voluntary birth control, instead of just denying them or dismissing them as outside impositions.

Dooming Black women to pregnancy every nine months regardless of what they would choose for themselves, given the chance--how is that not genocidal, how is that not reverting back to the systemic abuse of enslaved women as "breeders"? And how does that save their children's lives or help the children in any way?

Now, I do regard abortion as unjust lifetaking, and am concerned about the higher rates in the Black community. But not in the sense of blaming and scapegoating women who do their best to deal with often very difficult circumstances. In the sense of identifying and challenging the role of systemic racism here.

One cannot genuinely, practically challenge abortion as "genocidal" without also naming and challenging the social realities involved in the higher rate of Black abortion: institutionalized poverty, poor housing, lack of educational and job opportunities, lack of quality health care including family planning and prenatal services, family and community violence, the criminalization of young Black men...

All of these harsh realities, implicated in so many abortions, are the ongoing legacy in large part of a white-supremacist society that ran on slavery and then eugenics.

So there is this element of truth to the "genocide" charge...but please nobody invoke it to throw further burdens onto the shoulders of Black women--which cannot be good for Black children either, unborn or already born.

UNFPA, That Rampant Killer

An anonymous commenter on this blog implicates this blog/website in "killing babies" because of our support for UNFPA.

So, any mention of baby killing in this new dispatch from Americans for UNFPA? No. Because there's none to mention.


--UNFPA Rushes to Save Haiti’s Mothers

It fills my heart with joy to see the American response to the crisis in Haiti. As the President of Americans for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, I know our generosity sends a message that Americans step-up for those in need no matter where they live around the world.

We understand that even in the face of crisis, women continue to give birth. Sadly, for women in Haiti, it means that many will give birth in cars and tents, on park benches and bare ground, and under blazing sun with little water. Those who are lucky will manage to get to overcrowded hospitals or makeshift maternity wards with intermittent electricity and minimal equipment and supplies.

One of UNFPA’s top priorities is protecting the lives of mothers and their newborns. UNFPA is supplying safe delivery and reproductive health kits to still-standing hospitals, field hospitals, and mobile clinics. The kits contain life-saving medicines, supplies, and equipment for sterile deliveries, Caesarean surgeries, and treatment of other obstetric complications. In coordination with partners UNFPA is working to get the kits to all health facilities that need them, so that doctors and nurses have the medicines and supplies needed to protect the lives of women and their newborns.

Watch NOW on PBS documenting UNFPA and other organizations on the ground in Haiti working to save the lives of mothers during childbirth.

UNFPA and partners have initiated mobile clinic activities in 250 spontaneous settlements. Additionally, 20,000 dignity kits have been delivered to the border area and are being transported to Port-au-Prince and other areas that have been impacted by the earthquake. The kits contain items such as sanitary napkins, diapers, anti-bacterial soap, and other hygiene and cleaning supplies that allow women to live with dignity.

Did you know? Taxpayers can count charitable contributions made for relief efforts in Haiti on either their 2009 or 2010 tax returns as long as they are made before March 1, 2010.

But, our work has just begun. If we stand together, we can rebuild Haiti to be stronger than it was before. I thank you for your support in saving the lives of Haiti’s mothers.

Sincerely,

Anika Rahman
President, Americans for UNFPA

PS. Change doesn’t happen over night. Please consider joining our monthly donor program and lending your sustained support to UNFPA’s life-saving work.--

Moving Beyond Words

My vision for a broad prochoice/prolife movement to reduce abortion:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/commonground/2010/02/03/moving-beyond-words

Action Alert: Pregnant Women & Unborn Babies in Haiti

Pregnant women and their babies are highly vulnerable to death and injury in disaster situations. Please give to Americans for UNFPA in its work to aid the pregnant women and babies of Haiti.

What Our Readers Probably Have to Say Already About This Man

Randall Terry: Faux Life Leader

Please pass this on to every prolifer you know, especially those who appear to be still fooled by Terry.

What Prolife Means

Pro Life Means Guaranteed Maternity Care for All

RHRealityCheck.org: My Posts in the Common Ground Section

How to Stop the Abortion War Killings

Pro-Life, Pro-Contraception, & Pro-Tim Ryan

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

How to Begin?

How to even begin to organize a mass movement of people who are prolife on abortion and pro reproductive justice?

Once again, in the US alone, 80% of self-identified prolifers on abortion support contraception. Once again, younger people identify increasingly as pro life & pro LGBT...Where is the network of advocacy & service organizations that represent us?

Why haven't we created them already?

Jim Pouillon Murder

Jim Pouillon, a well known antiabortion protestor in the small town of Owosso, Michigan, was shot to death. A suspect is in custody for this shooting and for the shooting of another man in the town. While the motive in the second killing isn't clear or made public yet, apparently the suspect has cited his objection to Pouillon's protests.

Pouillon protested with large, graphic signs outside places where children & youth were--schools, a day care center, a church--that weren't even abortion clinics. As far as I am concerned, those methods of protest are highly objectionable. better to stand around without the gory pictures, offering substantive help with prevention & with help during pregnancy & beyond.

But no one should be shot in cold blood like he was.

I hope this doesn't turn into a prolife/prochoice spat over whose martyrs get the most media attention. It's horrible that *anybody* was murdered. And how did people bent on murder, for whatever motive, have access to guns?