A Nice Surprise on the Roe v. Wade Anniversary

On the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, it is difficult to find commentary on abortion that does not simply reiterate the same old dogmas of "conservative and antiabortion" in a tag team grudge match against "progressive and prochoice."

Thank you to reporter Patrick O'Neill for something different, something that gives voice to pro every life, pro nonviolent choice advocacy. That doesn't happen every day, either.

Pro-life eco-feminists work for consistent ethic of life

Nonviolent Choice Shares Its Vision With Change.gov

Turn the Clock Forward is inviting progressive prolifers to share their visions with Barack Obama and his administration through the change.gov website. Nonviolent Choice has taken up the invitation:

Dear President-Elect Obama,

I hope you will make good on your campaign promises and make a real, result-producing effort to bring prolifers and prochoicers together in an effort to alleviate the root causes of abortion.

In developing an action plan to reduce abortion, please call upon those of us who identify as pro *every* life, born and unborn, before, during, and ever after birth. We do exist. In fact, we have existed for centuries, often at the forefront of justicemaking movements of every kind. But US culture has all too often shut out what we have to say, even burying and suppressing our history.

The audacity of hope? I am audacious enough to hope that you and your administration will listen to everything we have to offer on the urgent matter of reducing abortion.

Sincerely,
Mary Krane Derr, Editor
Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info and nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com
Co-Editor of the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition (Feminism & Nonviolence Studies Association, 2005)

Want to Volunteer for Nonviolent Choice?

Nonviolent Choice needs volunteers to:

--Adopt a section or subsection of our Directory and check the hyperlinks once a month to make sure they still work. This is no unimportant task. Broken links keep our visitors from getting right to the information and assistance they seek, sometimes while they are in a personal crisis.

--Adopt a section or subsection of our Directory and search the Internet once a month for new or additional resources to nominate for it. We especially need volunteers who are familiar with countries other than the US and languages other than English.

Interested? Please email editor [at] nonviolentchoice [dot] info. Tell us what you would like to do and why. Thank you!

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.

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.

Eugenics: Alive and Still Kicking...the Same "Unfit" Folks in the Pelvis

By way of Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz, blog of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health:

Contrary to his party's stated preference for "hands off" governance, a Republican state rep in Louisiana, John LaBruzzo, is calling for finanical incentives so that low-income people will get sterilized and the well-off and educated will have more kids. He may not be calling attention to it, but is there not a certain suspect ethnic/racial as well as class distribution between the two portions of this scheme? And I have to wonder: does Rep. LaBruzzo himself come from any immigrant ethnic or working-class background that he now regards with contempt? Some people do, alas, when they "make it" in America.

This isn't just the specter of eugenics--specter, as if it ever passed away with the Third Reich. It *is* eugenics, and a cardinal principle of it: "More children from the fit, fewer from the unfit." With practically the same definitions of who is and isn't reproductively fit, handed down from the same place: on high.

Now where have we heard all this before? I highly recommend the coverage of eugenics in ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, as well as in Edwin Black's War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

The Nonviolent Choice Directory stands for voluntary contraception and against sterilization abuse and other forced uses (or nonuses) of family planning. Please see our resources on All Pregnancy Prevention Methods, which includes a section titled Protest Coercion in Family Planning.

The Palin Pregnancy Uproar

Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin identifies herself as a prolife feminist. Now I do not understand how that self-description squares with her poor environmental record, or her vote for abstinence-only sex education (among other things). But evidently (as of 2006, anyway) she is pro contraception. And to all signs, she has personally responded to not only her own but her daughter's crisis pregnancy as one hopes a prolife feminist would.

The US is all abuzz about the just publicly disclosed unplanned pregnancy of her 17 year old Bristol. The governor and her family decided to make this disclosure in the wake of ugly rumors that she was actually the grandmother and Bristol the mother of Trig, Sarah's baby born earlier this year with Down Syndrome.

The rumors evidently first got publicity from a diary posted on the liberal blogging site Daily Kos. It has since been removed, but, wanting to go to the source and form my own impressions, I saw it before it was.

I think people of any political school could agree, it was pretty low down. Some of the inhouse comments on the diary said as much, questioning whether this was slander and do you really want to sacrifice a teen just to bring down a candidate.

But others exulted about the Antichoice Harridan 'n' Hypocrite Exposed!, even saying that Gov. Palin shamed and used her daughter and took credit for not aborting the baby so she could look like a big fat antichoice saint and make others feel guilty for having abortions.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama responded to the uproar in a dignified manner. He pronounced candidates' families and especially their children (he is a protective father) off-limits in the campaign. And he promised to fire any of his own staff who spread around any of the abovementioned rumors. Barack did note that his own mother gave birth to him at age 18--suggesting even further sympathy with the Palin clan.

I think the whole onslaught against Sarah Palin and her daughter just goes to show, in a writ especially large fashion, the point Linda Naranjo-Huebl made in this blog not two weeks ago about the onslaught of ugly judgments still heaped on women with crisis or unplanned pregnancies.

I can only hope that Barack Obama's empathy for the Palin family-- along with Sarah Palin's now fully public welcome of not only her own fetus with Down Syndrome, but her pregnant daughter, and unborn grandchild-- will suggest something to the US collective consciousness/conscience. Namely, that there are other and better ways of responding to difficult pregnancies than such judgmentality-- whether that judgmentality puts on progressive or conservative clothes.

Stepping Up for Pregnant Women & Unborn Children In Her Own Home: Reflections from Linda Naranjo-Huebl

Linda Naranjo-Huebl is a professor of women's and American ethnic literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She lives parttime in her hometown of Denver, Colorado, where she and her family personally took into their own home dozens of pregnant women in need of emergency shelter. The women came to them through Alternatives Pregnancy Center, an agency founded and staffed by prolife women, many of whom identify proudly as feminists.

Naranjo-Huebl has borne considerable witness to the ongoing and harsh realities of gender discrimination and their role in abortion. She wrote about her years of service to beleaguered women in unplanned/crisis pregnancies for
ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, the book behind the Nonviolent Choice Directory. The following is an excerpt from her story, reprinted here with her permission.

The crisis, or crises, leading to the need for emergency housing during pregnancy became our [family's] own upon each woman's arrival, and I found myself increasingly angry and frustrated at those social forces that make pregnancy so difficult in the first place. Many people believe that as a society we have progressed from those days when a single woman's pregnancy was cause for ostracism or even punishment...

[But] women facing unplanned or inopportune pregnancies are subjected to all kinds of insults, censure, discrimination, and abandonment. They are aware of a continual undercurrent of judgment against them, including negative assumptions about their morals, their intelligence, their judgment, their self-discipline and sense of responsibility.

They also face more overt discrimination. We have witnessed, and vigorously protested, substandard treatment...by medical establishments, schools, and various social service agencies, not to mention their personal friends, family, and even their church communities. They are also routinely discriminated against in the workplace, if they can even get a job...

Our years of experience also taught us that reactions to unplanned pregnancy are frequently influenced by class and ethnicity. Middle- and upper-class Anglos tend to react more negatively to an unplanned pregnancy...[S]ome panicky middle- and upper-class white parents..would almost prefer their teenage daughter die than have a baby. Contrastingly, while aware that unplanned pregnancies come with a financial burden, the Latino, African American, and working class communities less often regard the situation as a major crisis. In my own extended Latino family, those most likely to consider an unplanned pregnancy as serious problem are those who are rising on the economic ladder.

We can see how these different cultural and economic perspectives extend beyond our borders. Women in the Two Thirds World frequently criticize American feminists for their emphasis on abortion rights instead of equal educational and economic opportunities for women. They tell us that children are not the problem; it's the systems into which they are born...

...When a controlling man (or parents) orders his girlfriend to get an abortion and she chooses otherwise, she is frequently motivated by a growing unconditional attachment and loyalty to her child and also to herself. Psychologists tell us that the "good enough" mother has a healthy sense of self and that her love for her child is an extension of her love for herself.

Abortion, then, can be interpreted, at one level, as an act against onself, against one's own identity. By contrast, the young women who defies boyfriend, husband, parents. friends, or authorities in carrying her child to term performs a heroic act that affirms and builds up her own sense of self while at the same time [she acknowledges the equally valuable life of her child.

And it is appropriate that we too affirm these equally valuable lives...and step up to help her overcome the obstacles she faces...

We're Not the Only Pro Contraceptive Prolifers

Turn the Clock Forward rounds up a Pro Contraception, Pro Life blogswarm.

LAMom's contributions link to that poll we all like a lot, the one showing that 80% of US prolifers are prochoice on contraception. There are many others like us, and probably more in other nations.

In short: we're not alone.
And this: kindly please do not dismiss us.

We Are Prolife and Pro-Contraception

Turn the Clock Forward is calling for a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm on May 31. Since I probably won't have much computer access on that day, I will chime in early.

I want to underscore the many ways that the Nonviolent Choice Directory helps to secure and protect the human rights to freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention and to strong social support for all voluntary prevention options. Contraception, of course, is included under these rights, as are rape and incest prevention and treatment, abstinence, fertility awareness/natural family planning, outercourse, and same-sex relations.

Nonviolent Choice:

• Offers global resources on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education of the comprehensive (contraception-inclusive, as opposed to abstinence-only) variety and all of the above methods of Pregnancy Prevention, most surely and at great length including contraception--including "male methods," consonant with our focus on Male Responsibility as a means of reducing abortion.

• With Turn the Clock Forward, cosponsors Pro Every Life, Pro Nonviolent Choice, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto, which endorses freedom of choice in and social support for pregnancy prevention methods--and how can that not include contraception?!
  
• Sells nonprescription family planning and safer sex items through our website.

• Regularly features action alerts that defend voluntary contraception (see the lefthand sidebar of this blog, "Current Action Alerts").

• Archives my debate/dialogue with an anti-contraception, anti-abortion visitor. This may be helpful to other pro-contraceptive prolifers engaged in similar debates/dialogues, especially the scientific references on whether hormonal contraceptives are abortifacient and whether contraception reduces abortion.

• If you are both prolife and pro-contraception, Nonviolent Choice shows that you have company, and that there are opportunities for political and civic engagement that express your beliefs!

Accusations from sluts4choice

The LiveJournal group sluts4choice have levelled a number of charges against the manifesto Pro Every Life, Pro Nonviolent Choice, Pro Reproductive Justice for All and its authors/sponsors, Turn the Clock Forward and the Nonviolent Choice Directory. Examples:

• we hate women, especially women who seek sexual pleasure;
• we believe women are stupid and incapable of conducting their own lives;
• we believe in mandatory motherhood;
• we destructively romanticize childbirth and motherhood;
• we oppose contraception.
  
  None of this is stated or even insinuated in the manifesto itself--quite the opposite. And none of this explains why, for example, the Nonviolent Choice Directory:

• Advocates for comprehensive sex education and contraception, outercourse & oral sex, & LGBT sexuality as well as abstinence and fertility awareness/natural family planning methods. See also this blog's sidebar for current action alerts on these matters.
• Sells nonprescription family planning and safer sex items through the website.
• Has a page on Other Ways to Give Life that covers childfree/childless/nonparental lifestyles and supports the right to pursue them.
• Lists a number of resources about a wide range of serious real-life problems that face mothers before, during, and after birth, including global maternal mortality, postpartum depression, and poverty. If we romanticized childbirth and motherhood, we would have no idea of what these problems are and what resources could possibly address them.

sluts4choice are reiterating dogmatic, by-definition stereotypes against anyone who opposes abortion. More importantly, they are cutting off all possibility of cooperative action on those large areas of reproductive justice where genuine agreement exists. There is so much work to be done, and these stereotypes really get in the way.

The group complains profusely about prolifers who do not support abortion-reducing measures. Although sluts4choice do not make it in a particularly respectful, constructive fashion--that's a fair challenge. Prolife does have to be during and after as well as before birth, or what good is it?

Yet what is their response to prolifers who *do* support abortion-reducing measures, and avidly, comprehensively so? Why, we can't possibly be for real!

Sigh.

ps I know that some feminists are trying to reclaim the word "slut" as a way to overcome its bigotry-enforcing history, and in fact I heartily endorse the goal of destigmatizing and affirming women's right to seek and enjoy sexual pleasure. But for some reason feminists calling themselves "sluts" sounds to me like the young African Americans in my neighborhood who refer to themselves and one another by the n-word--not particularly self-respecting, and wasn't the NAACP onto something when it gave said term a funeral?

Abortion No, Contraception Yes: Speak Up May 31

Are you one of the majority of prolifers (80 plus percent in the US) who advocate voluntary contraception and freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention?

Turn the Clock Forward is instigating a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm.

Please participate!

Reproductive Justice: Big Enough for the Both of Us?

A prochoice feminist who engages in dialogue with prolife feminists just remarked to me about how compelling she finds the vision of reproductive justice. And I responded that while I probably saw the place of abortion in that vision differently than she did, I too found it compelling.

What is reproductive justice? It is a vision of human, including women's, rights, lives, and wellbeing that has arisen primarily from women who are of color, poor, queer, and/or disabled. According to one powerful articulation of it, it

• "is rooted in the recognition of the histories of reproductive oppression"
• "uses a model grounded in organizing women and girls to change structural power inequalities"
• focuses "on the control and exploitation of women’s bodies, sexuality and reproduction as an effective strategy of controlling women and communities, particularly those of color. Controlling a woman’s body controls her life, her options and her potential. Historically and currently, a woman’s lack of power and self-determination is mediated through the multiple oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age and immigration status."

The voices of reproductive justice have often arisen and mobilized in part as a response to a prochoice movement that focuses primarily or exclusively on the issue of legalized abortion, and sometimes ignores or outright condones its own complicities with eugenic and coercive population control policies.

Many who have publicly identified with a reproductive justice approach believe it includes a right to abortion, even as it does not stop there. But it often occurs to me that it could be--and in many respects already is--the way to describe the framework from which many prolife feminists critique abortion while advocating for other reproductive concerns they share with prochoice feminists.

Many prolife feminists, after all, either come from or seek solidarity with the same constituencies that have birthed the reproductive justice movement. I think some of our interest in and invocation of prolife feminist herstory is about connecting to foremothers' critiques of reproductive oppressions that continue into the present.

Is reproductive justice Big Enough for the Both of Us? By the "Both of Us," I mean prolife and prochoice feminists. I believe so. I hope so. A reproductive justice framework could help both "camps" more readily identify and act upon common concerns, including a shared wish to reduce abortions and uintended pregnancies.

And...dare I ask...Is reproductive justice Big Enough for the Both of Us in yet another sense? Big enough to fully, simultaneously encompass unborn and already-born lives. In effect at least it does seem to, on the whole. For example the call of reproductive justice activists to end the harms of environmental racism and classism against women will certainly also benefit any unborn children affected women may be carrying.

And I don't expect that every reproductive justice advocate who is prochoice will persuaded by prolife feminism...but I think some will, I believe some are there already. And at any rate reproductive justice leaves an opening to consider and address the considerable areas of overlap between oppressions of already-born humans and those of unborn humans.

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.

News Flash! Amanda Marcotte Knows My True Motives and I Don't Have a Clue!!

At RH Reality Check, blogger Amanda Marcotte asks what for her is apparently a rhetorical question, with the preset answer a big giant "Hell, No!":

Do Anti-Choicers Really Care About the Abortion Rate?

Well, then, if I (for one, among many) were truly antichoice and did not give a flyin flip about reducing the abortion rate: what precisely am I doing here with the Nonviolent Choice Directory?

You tell me, Amanda Marcotte. For although you probably don't know me from Adam, you just know oh so much about my REAL motives and my deepest darkest self-- and I haven't a clue.

She characterizes people who adopt the approach taken here, and elsewhere, as "naive," as "sexist" buyers into "the anti-choice assumption that women are, by their nature, too damn stupid to know what abortion is and that the abortion rate reflects widespread female stupidity" and into "the misinformed notion that antichoicers are primarily motivated by a desire to save fetuses rather than a desire to control sexual expression, especially female sexual expression."

I (for one, among many) take the approach I do on abortion for reasons quite other than being naive, sexist, believing that women are too stupid to know what an abortion is, or complicit with people who use unborn children's lives as a smokescreen for their lust to punish people, especially women, for enjoying sex.

Although someone else could of course have parallel experiences and form a different conclusion...I am talking here about me, specifically, and why I feel, think, and do what I do.

I take this approach in part because I know, in my own flesh, what it is like to find yourself pregnant when you don't want to be, yet recoil from the thought of abortion. I experienced family planning failure--yes, I did and still do believe passionately in birth control--in a situation of poverty, ill health, detoured schooling and career plans, and heavy stigma placed on me at this evidence I'd had nonmarital sex. And against all the pressures to abort my daughter, I bore and raised her and fought very hard to give her a life of more dignity and safety--in short, freedom from sexism and abuse--than I personally ever knew as a child.

I did not have her to punish myself for having nonmarital sex. No, it wasn't about self-punishment, or submission to Almighty Ovarian Destiny. I had my daughter because I revered both our lives. I felt we were both important, we both had the rights to live and flourish, like all human beings.

And somehow, with the loving help of others, I found the wherewithal to sustain both of us and raise her into the bighearted, whipsmart, astounding young woman she is today. Even as I am outraged about how we were denied essential social benefits--human rights--that would have eased our interconnected passages, and about how billions of people are still denied these benefits, and much else.

I have also over the decades borne witness to the sacred crisis pregnancy stories of many, many women from all walks of life--some of whom define themselves as prolife, some as prochoice, some as apolitical. I have listened to these stories, whatever their outcomes, with the deepest respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the women who bear them. To me, feminism is about listening to women, especially the most silenced and unheard.

And from listening to all these women--and from reading the emergent body of scientific literature on why women have abortions...I believe that abortion so often happens not because women are stupid, but because they are denied the means and the power to plan pregnancy, or forego it altogether. Because they are denied the means and the power to bear and raise, or-- if it is their own choice place for adoption-- their children with the utmost support that human beings, whether born or unborn, need and fully deserve.

And it's not enough to be merely conscious of this; one must take action, and take action, and take action, to ensure that all women and children, born and unborn, can live and thrive to the fullest.

But to hear Amanda Marcotte, everything I've just said is either a lie, or is at best a massive, naive self-delusion.

That's the thing about these ad hominem arguments...they leave you with the sinking feeling that no amount of talk and action to the contrary will ever make a difference, that you will just be baited and provoked to produce more and more and more and none of it will ever be any good enough and credible enough to be admissible as evidence.

Because--consider the source, the bad, bad source--you are that vile-hypocrite thing, an "antichoicer."

I remember hearing a long time ago about a couple who, because they were prolife, thought they should adopt hard-to-place children. So they adopted a dozen of them. Some prochoicers people would come up to them and ask them, "Why don't you prolifer antiabortion people ever care about kids who are already born? Why don't you go and adopt those unwanted children?" When the couple explained that in fact they had adopted a dozen such children, they were confronted with, "Well, why haven't you people adopted ANY MORE?"

If prolifers who adopted a dozen hard-to-place kids couldn't "win"...I surely never will.

Note: None of this is to deny that sometimes prolifers impose their own ad hominem arguments on prochoicers...And for the record, I don't think that's fair, either. When prochoicers tell me that they aren't about "wanton baby killing," "destroying the family," "hating on G-d," or any of those things...I take them at their word. After all, they know their motives from the inside, and I do not.

From the Annals of "Gratitude for the Support"

Laura Grimes of the thoughtful, lovely blog Junia's Daughter has given Nonviolent Choice a big thumbs up in a post entitled Prolife Feminist Resource. Why, thank you.