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

Tell the National Organization for Women (US) What A Feminist Agenda Needs to Be

The National Organization for Women is running an online survey asking what issues a feminist agenda should prioritize under the new Obama administration.

I gave the Reproductive Rights and Sexual Health item the very highest priority. Then, in the space provided for those want to add another issue to the agenda, I explained that I strongly advocated all other sexual and reproductive choice and health matters. However, I wished for NOW to turn its energies from defending a general right to abortion to reducing abortion.

Not too likely, but those of us who believe in nonviolent choice need to make our voices heard, and here is an opportunity.

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?

Are Jennifer Baumgardner's Discoveries About Abortion and Prolife Feminism New?

Jennifer Baumgardner is a well-known US feminist who has published books on feminist organizing, "third wave" feminism, and bisexuality. She coproduced a documentary on prochoice women's abortion experiences and invented the "I Had an Abortion" T-shirt. She has just published Abortion and Life, a collection of women's narratives about their own abortions.

Although I have yet to read the book, I have read Mindy Van Deven's interview with her about it. The interview is entitled Can You Be A Feminist and Anti-Abortion?. The question is posed seriously, not rhetorically, and the answer, fortunately, is "a resounding yes" rather than the accustomed big fat NO.

Baumgardner shares some discoveries she has recently made about abortion from listening to women's experiences. She remains an abortion rights supporter, but some of her discoveries sound...well, rather familiar to my ears and the ears of a buncha people I know. And to our hearts.

• Considering such stories "rightwing propaganda," she previously was "resistant to hearing that a woman had a bad experience with her doctor or that she was extremely sad or had regrets about her abortion." Now she feels that such stories are real, if (to her view) in the minority, and "to suppress them or not want to hear them is a position of weakness."

• She now believes that the use of the term "fetus" as opposed to "child" is for many women who have had abortions "limiting and even alienating...I have met women who think of the child -- their word -- every year on the day it was due to be born...[W]omen write prayers to their unborn babies, asking them to be guardian angels."

• While she formerly thought abortion was "removing inanimate tissue," after witnessing abortion procedures, she now considers fetuses to be "human life." And she is "not cold" to the taking of their lives through abortion. She calls upon "pro-abortion people" to assume the "moral responsibility" of not shiedling themsleves from the "thornier or grislier aspects of abortion."

• She seriously acknowledges the existence of women who do recognizably feminist things like directing the "Vagina Monologues" or helping with Afghan girls' education, who have in some numbers asked her directly if they can identify as prolife on abortion and still be feminist. She has learned that they are not inquiring "whether bombing an abortion clinic can fall within the realm of feminism," but expressing and defending their serious concerns for the value of fetal life.

• Although she includes some points such as supporting early and medical abortions (?), she identifies the components of activism she would name as truly prolife feminist. These includes creating social supports for women who wish to raise their children; supporting contraception and comprehensive sex education; "actively condemn[ing] violence" against abortion providers; and "truly[ing] understand adoption, and work[ing] to make sure the birth mother has a voice." She concludes that "finding more and better ways" to be a prolife feminist "would be, in a word, revolutionary."

Although these insights may be new to Baumgardner, and perhaps others in her prochoice feminist circles, prolife feminists have been thinking, expressing, and taking action on these very realizations for centuries, very often in response to women's own stories of abortion and other difficult reproductive problems.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory, including this blog, is all about such "revolutionary" activism. The book it grew out of, ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, documents the long, rich, culturally, religiously and otherwise diverse herstory of prolife feminists.

But I don't think "who got here first?" is the most important question, even if it needs to be pointed out and backed up with extensive documentation.

The most important question is this: "Now that we're on the same page about so many vital points, how can we cooperate together to reduce abortion and otherwise promote reproductive justice?"

That's the one that ultimately will make the most difference to real-life, flesh-and-blood women and children, the already born and the unborn.

This Is Womanhood?

Melissa Fryrear is an alumna of the "ex-gay" movement and a staff member of Focus on the Family, the aggressively anti-LGBT organization. Her story of leaving her lesbian life concludes as follows.

During my years of restoration, I also began to learn about this thing called womanhood. Goodness! Who knew there was so much to learn: plucking eyebrows, hair bleaches, hair waxings, facial mud masks, eye lash curlers, manicures, pedicures, push-up bras, tummy tuckers, rear-end boosters, last year’s colors, and next year’s fashions?

I also began to learn about boys. Let me say that if anyone thinks puberty is tough at fifteen, try it in your thirties!

Now let me see if I read this correctly?
--A mature and healthy female sexuality is all about boys?
--Womanhood is a matter of trying to impress said boys via ever-shifting, consumer-capitalism driven, bodily tortures, fripperies, and fakeries--some of which contain chemicals quite damaging to female (and when applicable, fetal) health?

I can only say, how depressing. How confining.

ProLife Feminism Yesterday & Today Gets Another Great Book Review!

Kimberly Kelly, a graduate student at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, has published a great book review of ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of International Women's Studies. This, of course, is the book that led to the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

Kelly identifies herself as a prochoice feminist, and she gets and respects that prolife feminists are really, truly, deeply feminists as well, feminists who are eager to cooperate on reducing abortion. What well-timed balm on my very recent smarting from stereotypes and negativity from both "camps" in the abortion debate! It is such a delight to be understood and listened to by someone who evidently knows how to disagree respectfully while recognizing and appreciating common ground.

I will let you all read it for yourselves. But Kelly makes this point about the book's first part, the "yesterday" part, that I feel moved to address. Even though she does not attribute this failing to Part Two, quite the opposite.

It is disappointing that discussions of unique issues facing women of color and economically disadvantaged women written by these women are so infrequently included in the anthology. One can appreciate more privileged women recognizing and using their status to speak out in support of other women, but this is not a substitute for the voices of the groups directly affected.

This is true, that people from marginalized groups should be directly included. And I made a strenuous effort to find and include their voices. In some cases I (I wrote most of the editorial stuff in Part One) succeeded. Examples that come immediately to mind:

--Part One shows the origin of nineteenth century US feminism in the Haudenosaunee Six Nations, and reprints part of the Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet.

--The journalist Eleanor Kirk, author of "What Will Become of the Babies," suffered deep poverty with her children after leaving her abusive husband.

--The discussion of slavery includes the story and the voice of slave narrative author Harriet Jacobs.

--Scholar/activist Matilda Joslyn Gage was disabled, and her perspective on disability rights is reprinted.

--Some of the women represented in Part One were in modern terms lesbians, such as Frances Willard, Jane Addams, and Susan B. Anthony.

--The discussion of eugenics includes the voices of sterilization abuse survivors.

--Part One reprints a passage from a socialist-feminist play about crisis pregnancy by Rose Pastor Stokes, a Jewish birth control and labor activist from a decidedly workingclass background--she was even a child laborer in the cigar-making industry.

--The discussion of Irish Americans includes a passage from a poor mother's letter to the child she placed with the Foundling Hospital in New York.

--Workingclass women from the Women's Cooperative Guild in Great Britain have their say about the reproductive conditions under which they and other women labored.

--Part One concludes with the life and words of Dorothy Day, a Roman Catholic and therefore a member of a religion which, like the religion of Rose Pastor Stokes, at that time encountered signficant discrimination in the Protestant-majority US.

I feel horrible that I could include little more than this in Part One. But I encountered some large impediments in the historical research. The nineteenth and early twentieth century women's movement did include women of diverse religions, socioeconomic statuses, races/ethnicities, and sexual orientations. However, it was dominated by WASP-white, middle-to-upper class, Protestant women.

Not only were they the most visible and numerous feminists, the historical record privileges them over feminists from other groups. The voices of the non-majority feminists are far more scant and harder to find. I had absolutely no funding for the years of assiduous reseach. I had no institution or benefactor or mentor to back me up financially or otherwise, which was a strain because I have multiple disabilities and my family is working-poor. This book was written for love, not money! I slowly but thoroughly dug into the libraries and other resources I could access in my home city for free, and sent off for photocopies of documents I could identify in other institutions elsewhere. But I had no means to do the deep, onsite, in-person archival research in other places, the research indispensible to achieving a rounder picture.

So, Kimberly, sorry to disappoint you. But I tried very hard within these limits to represent the non-"mainstream" voices. I think maybe I achieved this a bit more than you apparently think, and if I didn't, it was not because I had the mindset of "privilege," which is definitely not where I, personally, come from!

Otherwise...a wonderful book review...thanks...

To read other reviews of the book, you can start here.

In Case Anyone Was Wondering.....

I took this online quiz, and now it's official. (:

This is a nice tool for educating people who are afraid of the "f" word.

That's not why I, personally, took it. I embrace the word despite being constantly told that I am the very opposite of one. Just wanted to see what would happen. So this is what happened. I answered all the questions honestly, too.

Although--me, I'd personally take off the boxing gloves and pose with mudras (sacred hand postures) instead.

You Are 100% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

More Debate on Contraception

ben.d and I continue our debate/dialogue on contraception.

I include links to scientific literature online (full-text and abstract) that shows the ability of contraception to reduce abortion.

Now Expanded: Our Resources on Male Responsibility

The Male Responsibility section of the Nonviolent Choice Directory has once again been expanded.

Yes, male responsibility is a big topic here.

Although many are by/for men of the Euro persuasion...it is interesting how many of the available resources are by/for men of color.

Please check out these resources. And for anyone who might be wondering--we are not anti-male.

Feminism is not about hating men. It is about treating women with the love and respect we deserve as human beings. And that can, in the end, only be good for men as well. It does no one any good to put down another.

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.

Wow, A Thumbs Up

The EatonWeb Blog Directory offers these kind words about Nonviolent Choice. (No, we did not pay them to say this, nor to list us.)

• "Thought-provoking and opinionated, this blog takes a relatively unorthodox approach to the controversial issue of abortion. Whatever your position, this blog is worth your time for its thoughtful approach."

Well, gosh. Thank you.