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 .

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.

LGBT Phobia Promotes Abortion: Another Story in This Vein

The Catholic University of America banned the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians from cosponsoring the recent Students for Life conference held on its campus.

The US head of the Rainbow Sash Movement, which promotes greater visibility of LGBT Catholics, sent off a media release protesting the exclusion. Students for Life and many members of the CUA student body disagreed strongly with the administration's decision. Which, by the way, was made with a lack of transparency--the same thing that shrouds many other discriminatory decisions.

As well as the violation here of the rights to free speech and freedom of association....If the voices of LGBT people are not heard in the prolife movement, the movement is all the poorer. How can it be about the right to life of LGBT people, too? And what can it learn to do to help LGBT people who are at risk for, or currently experiencing, crisis pregnancies--a very real problem?

LGBT Phobia Leads to Crisis Pregnancy and Abortion

This post originally appeared on the blog of PLAGAL, the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. It appears here with the blessing of its author, Cecilia Brown, current PLAGAL president and a woman who has firsthand experience with the subject.

When I was young I knew I was different than everyone else. The only thing I ever heard when I was growing up was how “queers were *&%#*& perverts”. I spent my time trying to pretend I was someone else, straight.

As a result I ended up not with just one unintended pregnancy but two. One ending in abortion that almost ruined my life and the other the birth of my daughter. Because of this experience I have become active in the pro life movement and have gone on to become president of PLAGAL- The Pro life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians.

I share my story of how homophobia led me to pregnancy, abortion and how I came to the pro life movement to college campuses across the United States and parts of Canada. I have always known that pregnancy in the LGBT community was more wide spread because when I share my story many come forward to share theirs. For most of these individuals the only alternative to dealing with unplanned pregnancies that was ever mentioned was abortion. Abortion causes another bad can of worms to be opened up.

If sexuality were discussed in homes and in school for what it really was, suffering of so many would be eliminated. Finally I discover that someone else has been looking at the issue other than myself and has published their findings. To read the article that appeared in 365gay.com just click on the link below.

http://www.365gay.com/news/study-lesbian-teens-at-higher-pregnancy-risk/

For Once, A Single-Issue Approach Would Be Better!

I never thought I'd advocate a single-issue approach to abortion, but I have found one situation where I wish this were the case.

December 10 of this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And to mark the occasion, the conservative Catholic group C-FAM is sponsoring a petition to call for inclusion of unborn humans in the Declaration.

Ah, but that's not all. In order to declare your support for this proposed revison to the Declaration, you have to declare your undying support for some other stuff, too...after all, it all must automatically go together, no?

Namely, the unborn child not only has the right to life, but "the right to be conceived, born and educated within the family, based on marriage between a woman and a man, the family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society."

So much for us prolifers who believe prolife includes universal public commitment to the equal education of all children, and respect and ample social support for diverse, egalitarian family forms, including families headed by single parents, adoptive and foster parents, and LGBT persons, including of course same-sex couples.

Apparently we are not eligible to support the the unborn child's right to human life. Voila! We are disaqualified! Who needs us God-hating fornicators and sodomites, hunh? We can't be for real anyway, can we?

I bet C-FAM could get a lot more signatures if it did not in this petition put such a "family values" qualification on support for the unborn child's human right of life. If they want to add their beliefs about family life to the Declaration, why not call for that in a *separate* petition?

There are prolifers like me who have thoughtful, compassionate, and even (gasp!) ethical, religious and spiritual motives for not connecting such a view of "family values" to protection of the unborn child.

For one, if an unborn child's right to life is respected by protecting him or her from abortion, but he or she is not conceived, born, and/or educated within the heterosexual nuclear family... then he or she by definition has a wronged and compromised life. He or she has a fundamentally spoiled identity...and how is this so different, from example, from the supposedly no-longer-in-use designation of nonmaritally conceived human beings as "illegitimate"?

When any human is regarded as having a spoiled identity, then he or she becomes *more* vulnerable to violence and discrimination, *not less.* Before birth, as well as after.

The Prolife & Pro LGBT Group PLAGAL Joins the Blogosphere

While some antiabortionists are virulently LGBT-phobic, still others believe that prolife means the lives and wellbeing of LGBT persons as much as unborn children and pregnant women. A number of such prolifers are LGBT themselves.

Luckily there are friendly places online for LGBT and LGBT-allied prolifers. Nonviolent Choice is one of them. For example, we believe that choice in pregnancy prevention includes the right to choose same-sex relationships. (If you want to recommend any more LGBT-friendly topics or websites to us, please recommend them.)

But the hands down best prolife advocate by and/or for by LGBT persons is PLAGAL, the Prolife Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, a US based nonprofit that has been around since 1990, making bridges between communities that are too often miscast as diametrical opponents.

PLAGAL has long maintained a website at www.plagal.org And now PLAGAL has joined the blogosphere at prolifegays.blogspot.com/

Welcome, PLAGAL, from a longtime fan.

Educate Others--or Maybe Yourself!-- About LGBT Justice

Soulforce is an interfaith, US-based group whose mission is "to cut off homophobia at its source -- religious bigotry. Soulforce uses a dynamic 'take it to the streets' style of activism to connect the dots between anti-gay religious dogma and the resulting attacks on the lives and civil liberties of LGBT Americans. We apply the creative direct action principles taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to peacefully resist injustice and demand full equality for LGBT citizens and same-gender families."

Soulforce publishes two great booklets to help anyone who wishes to educate others about the rights of LGBT people. They can be ordered in print, or read and downloaded from the following links:

What the Bible Says, and Doesn't Say, about Homosexuality by Reverend Mel White, Soulforce cofounder (in English and Spanish)

What the Science Says - And Doesn't Say - About Homosexuality by Jeff Lutes, Soulforce executive director

We are proud to say that the Nonviolent Choice Directory is listed in the acknowledgments of the science booklet!

So much prejudice against LGBT people results from a lack of knowledge. These booklets directly address the stereotypes in a spirit of love.

"Life Will Find A Way to Survive": An Interview With Ecofeminist Rosalie Bertell

Rosalie Bertell, born in 1929, is a dual Canadian/US citizen, Roman Catholic nun, and endorser of the Consistent Life mission statement. A controversial but persevering ecofeminist, she works on healing and preventing global environmental disasters with a focus on “making the victims visible.” In 1986 she received the Right Livelihood Award, also called the “alternative Nobel Prize.” She is founder and past longtime director of the Toronto, Canada-based International Institute of Concern for Public Health. This nonprofit collaborates with impoverished people and communites of color devastated by radiation or chemical pollution.

Disclaimer: The views that Rosalie expresses are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the IICPH, nor those of her religious order, the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart.

MARYSIA: Please tell us a bit about yourself.

ROSALIE: My training and experience includes a Ph.d. in environmental epidemiology, and about 40 years of experience in international community health issues. I am retired, but still writing about the toxic exposures of the Gulf War veterans, the people living in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and the community disasters in the Pacific Islands, Bhopal, and Chernobyl.

MARYSIA: I've heard the nuclear threat--still a threat-- described as "planetary abortion." And global environmental destruction as "eco-abortion." In what ways do these forms of violence relate to the despair and suffering of a woman who feels she has no choice but to end her pregnancy? And to the fact that every year, millions of women and unborn children worldwide--even in such a materially wealthy nation as the US--end up in such a dire place?

ROSALIE: It has always touched my heart that women in the Nazi death camps and starving women in war-torn Africa give birth to babies and retain their hope in the future. While in affluent countries, giving birth is no longer a sacred trust with the future, but an intolerable burden for many! I do not think that women and natural mothering impulses have changed. Rather, it is our cultural and environmental surroundings which have changed.

MARYSIA: What are some of these changes?

ROSALIE: Since the early 1940s, the load of toxins and radiochemicals in the environment has increased steadily, and more and more children are born with congenital malformations and diseases. Asthma, autism, attention deficit, and other disabilities have become commonplace, making parenting more difficult.

Our culture scorns children who are “different,” for example, those who are hormonally disadvantaged. Although I have seen feminized fish, birds, and wild animals around the Great Lakes…homosexuality is considered by many fundamentalists to be “sinful.” Homosexual or bisexual children have a difficult time in our culture and even in their own birth family.

MARYSIA: Yes, the mistreatment of Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered people is a huge injustice. But are you saying that LGBT people are somehow "hormonally disadvantaged" from, for example, endocrine disruptor compounds? There were plenty of LGBT people long, long before any chemist dreamed up those compounds and unleashed them on the global environment.

We do not yet really know why one child is born heterosexual and the next person is born LGB or T. If it appears that LGBT people are more numerous now, it's probably because, despite continued discrimination, it's safer to be out and visible, now more than ever, at least in Canada, the US, and a few other nations.

Maybe this kind of human variability is something natural, inborn, and socially valuable in its own right. Edward Carpenter, a late 19th century/early 20th century ecofeminist and a gay man himself, predicted a time when LGBT people would take honored roles in the overall societal responsibility to care for children. Maybe this is the transformation that is struggling to be born right now?

ROSALIE: I think that there must be a "normal curve" of sexual behaviour – with people finding themselves somewhere along this curve either at one extreme or the other, with most people near to the middle of the curve. I think that endocrine disruptors are causing the curve to change from normal to an abnormal shape, perhaps at both extremes of this curve. No individual can be judged as having normally occurring sexual preferences or chemically/radio-chemically caused preferences.

The Bible does not condemn gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transsexuals. If you read the texts carefully, you will see that it only condemns "abnormal" sexual behaviour. If it is normal for one to be the way he or she is, then I believe it is permissible - barring of course violence to another person.

This seems to me to be a great problem of the churches which needs to be understood from God's point of view. If God indeed produces a whole range of sexual characteristics, they are "good" and "useful" in God's plan for the earth community of life. For humans to assume the right to change people's sexual orientation either by chemical or radioactive exposures is then very wrong to do. However, the wrong is on the polluter not the victim.

Irish families always had aunts and uncles who did not marry, but they were very involved with helping their siblings with the children, caring for parents, serving in the Church or social ministry, etc. They always led socially fruitful lives. I do not believe in selfish choices of lifestyle because it diminishes the person to choose to be selfish.

MARYSIA: Please say more about the environmentally related rise in children with disabilities.

ROSALIE: There are increasing problems on this, which is not yet openly faced, but running under the mental radar. I also think that the prolife groups have missed the issue of the right to bear healthy children. There are many barren couples who have been affected by radiation (nuclear fallout, local nuclear facilities, or even medical x-ray) and they are either unable to bear children or to bear healthy children. This is a violation of a very fundamental human right.

Surviving children of radiation- and toxic chemically- polluted parents are less able to cope with ordinary life on this planet, our home. We are also polluting the planet with more and more toxic chemical and radioactive waste dumps. Since they will have more to cope than my generation had to cope with, this is a fatally deteriorating problem which could eventually end in species extinction and maybe omnicide for all life.

MARYSIA: You've said, in the context of effective nonviolent actions for peace: "Life is stronger than death." What are some of the things that "ordinary" global citizens might possibly do to help afflicted pregnant women tap into that power of life, for themselves as well as their children?

ROSALIE: “Life” is communal, and strong communities can help us to have hope in the future and to free ourselves from the addiction to violent solutions of all of our problems in life. Abortion is a violent solution to such a problem.

Since the 1960s, we have been able to remove an embryo from one mammal and place it in the womb of another mammal. For example, a herd of cow embryos could be sent to Africa from the US in the wombs of a few rabbits, and then reimplanted in African cows.

This would also work for people, but the social implications of this seem insurmountable. We could together work out ways to preserve the life of the embryo/fetus and the reputation/economic viability of the mother.

On the Pacific Islands, babies belong to a family and not essentially to the birthparents (although they know their birthparents). There is no such thing as an illegitimate birth. Even young married couples give their first baby to the bride’s parents and their second to the groom’s parents. “Every home should have a child” is their social philosophy.

A friend of mine lost a teenage daughter to leukemia in French Polynesia, and at the wake, two local Polynesian families gave her and her husband two healthy babies, a boy and a girl. She was overwhelmed with both the grief and the joy of those babies. They brought the children up, knowing that these children were a special bond with the Polynesian people and especially the families who gave them the children. The girl is now a local medical doctor, having studied in California, while the boy is a successful technician at a local automobile shop.

Children are a right and a privilege; they belong to the community and have the potential of drawing families closer together. Yet the Pacific Islanders also realize that their islands have a “carrying capacity,” food in an amount which will sustain just so much life, and they stay within that capacity. This too is a community sense of what is ethical and helpful for survival.

We, as a North American community, seem to have lost these skills. I believe that they are dormant and could be revived as we change our social philosophy! We need to understand ourselves as part of our bioregion, and not as separate from nature and somehow licensed to exploit it!

MARYSIA: Anything else you feel is vital to say here?

ROSALIE: I think it is important to see ourselves as recipients of a beautiful and health giving planet. We need to use seeds with gratitude and humility, as a precious and valuable gift. We are currently in North America consuming about four times our share of the global commons, while Europe is consuming twice their share and many nations are living well below their fair share. We need to think more globally and understand that we can find ways to share and still maintain a livable lifestyle.

One such way is to stop wars altogether. Women have a special power to break this “patriotic” mindset. Wars destroy the planet with its wealth of resources, and the human infrastructure necessary for life. Wars do remove people from the planet in large enough numbers to make sharing easier, but they rarely result in anything other than gluttony and hoarding—which, of course, leads to more wars over scarce resources. This is stupid and not in any way “patriotic”!

MARYSIA: Yes..women can call on the power it takes to bear and nurse life to resist violence against their own children--starting in the womb, but not stopping there. And women need and deserve our collective help in resisting violence before and after birth...Now there's a positive reframing of "patriotic duty"! The whole mentality of "Don't have an abortion; we need your cannon fodder” is really one of disrespect for life at all stages.

ROSALIE: I agree, and believe that women must stop glorifying war and giving their sons and daughters to this war machine!

MARYSIA: And there is much anyone, anywhere can do…for instance…

ROSALIE: One can give time to learning about conflict resolution, conscientious objection to war, nonviolent protests, and what is called active nonviolence. It is difficult and countercultural but necessary to save our human race, our living environment, and our planet home.

People can put their own skills, knowledge, and opportunities together to make a difference for life. In this way, life will find a way to survive. She has always done this in surprising ways!

MARYSIA: We can only hope your prayer will be answered. Thank you very much.


If you want to learn more, there are many books by or about Rosalie Bertell. They include Dr. Mary-Louise Engel’s print biography Rosalie Bertell: Scientist, Eco-Feminist, Visionary from the Women’s Press “Women Who Rock” series.

Stop Harassment of LGBT Youth

A Memphis, Tennessee high school principal has taken punitive, privacy-invading measures against LGBT students. Please join with Advocates for Youth to protest the harassment.

Among the many dire results of hostility towards LGBT youth: risky, unprotected experimentation with heterosexual sex that may result in undesired pregnancies and abortions.

Homophobia, biphobia, & transphobia are the opposite of prolife!

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.

Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday Part One

As a US citizen, I am happy that the birthday of the martyred civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of our national holidays. But I am not happy with what many US whites make of him. I need to first be clear my standpoint: I personally am of Euro descent, although I hail largely from the more oppressed Euro ethnicities, the ones that have been referred to as "white n******." I have lived almost all my adult life in an urban, poor/working-class black neighborhood now threatened by gentrification, raised my child here, and my own household/family is interracial (black-white).

Too many white Americans look upon the establishment of King's birthday as a national holiday as a definitive proof that we have arrived at his Promised Land already...even as the struggle is far from over, even as they have not yet begun to unlearn the vast reservoirs of white privilege to which any white person in this society is heir, consciously or unconsciously, even the most wellintentioned white liberals (myself, alas, included).

White privilege remains intact as a big blinder to the ongoing struggles for economic and environmental justice, for peace in and outside black homes and neighborhoods, for self-respect and the healing of the deep psychological wounds that have accumulated down the 500 years that people of African descent have been in the Americas. It expresses itself in such plaints as "What are You People always so angry about, didn't you get what you wanted?" And in such deeds as the police's constant roughing up of my future son in law, who braids and do-rag and all has not a criminal deed to his name. Except the purported offense of Driving While Black, and that with a white woman, my daughter.

There is also a prevailing white view of King that sanitizes away his profound and prophetic radicalism. That Dr. King is not the Dr. King, for example, of the 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, nor the Dr. King commemoratedby the LGBT rights Soulforce in its dispatch Can You Hear Martin Luther King Today?

Soulforce recounts King on racism, militarism, and materialism. They do not speculate on his possible views of homophobia. All we can know today, really is that he stood by his friend and civil rights movement colleague Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and an openly gay man.

In the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, King speaks of being "moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart" and of the "many persons [who] have questioned me about the wisdom of my path... And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live."

His vision of nonviolence was ever more-expansive; who knows today where it would have stopped, if anywhere? And being ever more expansive, it ran into the truisms and partititions of his time.

Which for me raises the question: What might King have made of a feminist, consistent life ethic?--Next Up.

From the Annals of "Sometimes Ms. Marysia Loses Her Temper"

The noted antiabortion blogger Jill Stanek posted a long, salaciously lingering "expose" of San Francisco's gaily presented Folsom Street Fair.

Although it is open to debate whether and to what extent various components of the Fair make merry with and indeed cross the boundaries of good taste and public decorum--provided, of course, they actually happened, and not just in exaggeration-prone imaginations inflamed with moral outrage--Stanek presents it as an Oh-My-God case study that verifies the QED truism, "Homosexuality=Abortion." An assertion which I for one am very tired of.

I posted this in response, a bit inflamed myself with my own species of moral outrage:

Homosexuality causes abortion? Is that what they teach in those abstinence-only sex ed classes these days? I thought only one form of human sexual expression, male-female penis-vagina intercourse, had any possibility of leading to a problem pregnancy and abortion, especially if it is not accompanied by some form of contraception or natural family planning.

But maybe I was kidnapped, abused, and brainwashed by some ravenous renegade Homosexuality/Pedophilia/Bestiality squad till I believed that? (for the record, most sexual abusers of children are men who abuse little girls and identify as straight...same,i think, with sexual abusers of animals...)

Homosexuality causes abortion? Well, that's news to all the LGBT youth who are pressured by society to hate themselves so much that they abort themselves right out of our delicate, affronted moral sensibilities by committing suicide. Or by taking self-destructive risks with heterosexual sex (see above) and ending up with problem pregnancies and abortion?

Homosexuality causes abortion? Well, that's big news to all the members and allies of PLAGAL, the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians,www.plagal.org, who stand up for unwanted life before and after birth with a courage and an ethical power that should do any social-justice, human-rights movement (like the prolife movement is supposed to be) proud.

Homosexuality causes abortion? Well, if there is ever a prenatal test for sexual orientation, let's see if antiabortionists are going to speak out against the rash of abortions that are bound to occur in the homophobic culture so many of them are complicit with--or if they're just going to say, "Homosexuality causes abortion"...just like being female causes sex-selective abortion, or being disabled causes disability abortion, right?

From a proudly LGBT-affirming, longtime prolifer

Alternatives to the Military

We have added some resources on alternatives to the military (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html#altmil if the link doesn't work) to our Education pages. These are mostly for people in the US, during this time of most unjust war, but some apply worldwide. (Note: If the above hyperlink does not work, please paste the URL into your browser: http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html#altmil )

These resources can help if:
--you are wondering how to pay for your education or have a good career and take care of yourself and/or your family without enlisting in the military.
--you have ethical reasons for wanting to no longer keep military commitments you have made (for example, in the US military, you are concerned about your safety as a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered person, or you are questioning the wisdom of the Iraq War).
--you have decided you are a conscientious objector and wonder what your next step is.
--you want to join in the global movement to defend the human right of refusal to kill in wartime.
--you are interested in a career as a peacemaker or nonviolence advocate.

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.

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.