Welcome & Thank You...
...for visiting the Blog of the Nonviolent Choice Directory.
These measures include post abortion healing; male responsibility; comprehensive sexual/reproductive health education; all voluntary pregnancy prevention methods, plus rape and incest prevention & treatment; and life-affirming ways to get through crisis pregnancy and beyond.
Along with responding to our current action alerts, and participating in our Blog, you are welcome to volunteer with us.
We feature commentary but most of all action alerts on the same positive, abortion-reducing measures we cover in the Directory.
These measures include post abortion healing; male responsibility; comprehensive sexual/reproductive health education; all voluntary pregnancy prevention methods, plus rape and incest prevention & treatment; and life-affirming ways to get through crisis pregnancy and beyond.
Along with responding to our current action alerts, and participating in our Blog, you are welcome to volunteer with us.
Showing posts with label Reproductive Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reproductive Justice. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
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.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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.
Friday, March 5, 2010
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 .
"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 .
Thursday, February 4, 2010
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.--
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
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/commonground/2010/02/03/moving-beyond-words
Thursday, January 14, 2010
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.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options
The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.
The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.
You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.
The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.
You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.
Take a Stand for Pregnant Women & Their Children
Pesticides *still* endanger pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies. Please read the personal testimonies and take action here, with the United Farmworkers union:
http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej
http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Gun Control Is a Reproductive Justice Issue: Some Thoughts for Mother's Day
(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )
It happened again last week in my neighborhood, just a few blocks from where my family lives. I didn't hear the shots or the screams this time, but other times, I have. This past week, it was in broad daylight. The toll was one dead, one wounded--both young Black men.
And not a word about their fates in the big media, though certainly there was among the distressed neighbors. Including the children who grow up here knowing every day what children shouldn't have to think about too much: that their lives could be cut short on purpose by someone else in an irrevocable instant. A sweet-faced young man my daughter grew up with died from a gunshot to the back of his head. He left a baby girl behind. As much as for him, we wept to see his overwhelmed parents, family, and friends at the funeral.
I could take you on a sad pilgrimage around my neighborhood and show you all the telephone poles, corners, stretches of sidewalk, and weedy vacant lots where fellow human beings, mostly young Black men, saw the last of this Earth because of gun violence. There is nothing left in these places to mark their premature and abrupt departures except for the sorrowful and outraged hearts of those who pass by and remember what happened there and there and there.
Every year in the United States, gun violence kills 30,000 human beings and injures another 70,000. Gun rights advocates like to say, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." So why is it that I've never met anyone in my neighborhood who agrees with this statement? So many of these killings and woundings happen regularly in neighborhoods like mine, to low-income people of color, often Black and Brown young men.
In other words, it's not the same world most gun rights advocates inhabit. They tend to be majority-white and far more prosperous and able to pay for lobbyists. I am speaking of those who manufacture and profit from the gun trade, and the hunters who (in this country anyway) kill animals primarily for sport and not substinence.
In casting the gun issue as a matter of individual rights and responsibilities, the gun lobby only fuels the criminalization and scapegoating of impoverished people of color, especially young men. Framing the issue this way has an unmistakable implication: better-off white people must know how to handle their guns responsibly, and low-income people of color must not--why else would there be so many more gun crimes and deaths in *those* neighborhoods? *Those* people got what was coming to them, didn't they?
This framing of the gun issue prevents Americans from taking up the collective responsibilities we have too long failed: our collective responsibilities to structurally alleviate poverty, classism, and racism.
These include our collective responsibilities to challenge the patterns of underregulated or unregulated marketing and distribution which have allowed the gun industry to systematically insinuate its way into inner-city neighborhoods. Geoffrey Canada, a noted child welfare activist from the Black community, has spoken up about the gun industry's conscious strategies for moving into the inner-city once it had saturated and achieved the maximum profit it could from the "sportsmen's" market.
In the inner city, it's human beings who get hunted with guns now, and in most cases legal guns. 88% of guns used in crimes were bought quite legally from the rampantly unregulated sectors of the gun market. And US-made guns flood the international trafficking in small arms, which is responsibile for the high rate of gun violence in other beset places populated by poor human beings of color, like the favelas of Brazil.
Every single human being killed or hurt by gun violence made it onto this Earth in the first place because a woman carried him/her for nine months, birthed him/her, and in most cases raised him/her. And many victims of gun violence are, or were, parents themselves.
The right to raise our children in a safe, healthy environment is a core demand of reproductive justice. Not surprisingly, this demand arises from the very communities of color most devastated by gun violence. As well as an obvious pro every life concern, gun control is a reproductive justice issue.
Guns rights advocates are also the children of mothers, and many are parents themselves. Aside from the gun makers and those who hunt animals for sport, some honestly believe that the unregulated right of gun ownership is essential to protect themselves and their families.
What if they could see how much the lack of gun control undermines the ability of people in neighborhoods like mine to protect ourselves and our children? What if they could glimpse what we already have learned too often, the hard way: that guns constitute the falsest of hopes for personal security? That widescale disarmament is ultimately the best way to keep every mother's son or daughter, every parent, every human being safe and healthy as can be?
It happened again last week in my neighborhood, just a few blocks from where my family lives. I didn't hear the shots or the screams this time, but other times, I have. This past week, it was in broad daylight. The toll was one dead, one wounded--both young Black men.
And not a word about their fates in the big media, though certainly there was among the distressed neighbors. Including the children who grow up here knowing every day what children shouldn't have to think about too much: that their lives could be cut short on purpose by someone else in an irrevocable instant. A sweet-faced young man my daughter grew up with died from a gunshot to the back of his head. He left a baby girl behind. As much as for him, we wept to see his overwhelmed parents, family, and friends at the funeral.
I could take you on a sad pilgrimage around my neighborhood and show you all the telephone poles, corners, stretches of sidewalk, and weedy vacant lots where fellow human beings, mostly young Black men, saw the last of this Earth because of gun violence. There is nothing left in these places to mark their premature and abrupt departures except for the sorrowful and outraged hearts of those who pass by and remember what happened there and there and there.
Every year in the United States, gun violence kills 30,000 human beings and injures another 70,000. Gun rights advocates like to say, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." So why is it that I've never met anyone in my neighborhood who agrees with this statement? So many of these killings and woundings happen regularly in neighborhoods like mine, to low-income people of color, often Black and Brown young men.
In other words, it's not the same world most gun rights advocates inhabit. They tend to be majority-white and far more prosperous and able to pay for lobbyists. I am speaking of those who manufacture and profit from the gun trade, and the hunters who (in this country anyway) kill animals primarily for sport and not substinence.
In casting the gun issue as a matter of individual rights and responsibilities, the gun lobby only fuels the criminalization and scapegoating of impoverished people of color, especially young men. Framing the issue this way has an unmistakable implication: better-off white people must know how to handle their guns responsibly, and low-income people of color must not--why else would there be so many more gun crimes and deaths in *those* neighborhoods? *Those* people got what was coming to them, didn't they?
This framing of the gun issue prevents Americans from taking up the collective responsibilities we have too long failed: our collective responsibilities to structurally alleviate poverty, classism, and racism.
These include our collective responsibilities to challenge the patterns of underregulated or unregulated marketing and distribution which have allowed the gun industry to systematically insinuate its way into inner-city neighborhoods. Geoffrey Canada, a noted child welfare activist from the Black community, has spoken up about the gun industry's conscious strategies for moving into the inner-city once it had saturated and achieved the maximum profit it could from the "sportsmen's" market.
In the inner city, it's human beings who get hunted with guns now, and in most cases legal guns. 88% of guns used in crimes were bought quite legally from the rampantly unregulated sectors of the gun market. And US-made guns flood the international trafficking in small arms, which is responsibile for the high rate of gun violence in other beset places populated by poor human beings of color, like the favelas of Brazil.
Every single human being killed or hurt by gun violence made it onto this Earth in the first place because a woman carried him/her for nine months, birthed him/her, and in most cases raised him/her. And many victims of gun violence are, or were, parents themselves.
The right to raise our children in a safe, healthy environment is a core demand of reproductive justice. Not surprisingly, this demand arises from the very communities of color most devastated by gun violence. As well as an obvious pro every life concern, gun control is a reproductive justice issue.
Guns rights advocates are also the children of mothers, and many are parents themselves. Aside from the gun makers and those who hunt animals for sport, some honestly believe that the unregulated right of gun ownership is essential to protect themselves and their families.
What if they could see how much the lack of gun control undermines the ability of people in neighborhoods like mine to protect ourselves and our children? What if they could glimpse what we already have learned too often, the hard way: that guns constitute the falsest of hopes for personal security? That widescale disarmament is ultimately the best way to keep every mother's son or daughter, every parent, every human being safe and healthy as can be?
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Send a Safe Birthing Kit for $8
(crossposted at Marysia's RHReality Check diary)
If you have access to the Internet, chances are that even with the
global economic downturn, you are still, wherever you may live, prosperous compared to the average person and family in the Two-Thirds World.
Are you still able to spare $8? UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, will send on your behalf a birthing kit to help protect and save the lives of one mother and one baby in a materially poor country.
(Note: UMCOR's relief work is something that I suspect people of all faiths and none could support--not all Christians use relief work as a pretense for prostelytizing by a long shot--but please check this out for yourself.)
Maternal and child mortality are interconnected global scourges. They are directly caused by the inhumane failure to make widely available even low-tech, inexpensive solutions like birthing kits or oral rehydration therapy to those who most desperately need them.
As UNFPA insists,"No Woman Should Die Giving Birth." Please visit this UNFPA site if you want to learn more about this unnecessary, preventable global injustice--and please be the solution for one mother and one baby through UMCOR.
Large institutional changes in health care are necessary to solve the problem on
a massive scale, but individuals and families in the present cry out for direct and immediate help, too.
Surely this is an area where prolife and prochoice can and should cooperate.
If you have access to the Internet, chances are that even with the
global economic downturn, you are still, wherever you may live, prosperous compared to the average person and family in the Two-Thirds World.
Are you still able to spare $8? UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, will send on your behalf a birthing kit to help protect and save the lives of one mother and one baby in a materially poor country.
(Note: UMCOR's relief work is something that I suspect people of all faiths and none could support--not all Christians use relief work as a pretense for prostelytizing by a long shot--but please check this out for yourself.)
Maternal and child mortality are interconnected global scourges. They are directly caused by the inhumane failure to make widely available even low-tech, inexpensive solutions like birthing kits or oral rehydration therapy to those who most desperately need them.
As UNFPA insists,"No Woman Should Die Giving Birth." Please visit this UNFPA site if you want to learn more about this unnecessary, preventable global injustice--and please be the solution for one mother and one baby through UMCOR.
Large institutional changes in health care are necessary to solve the problem on
a massive scale, but individuals and families in the present cry out for direct and immediate help, too.
Surely this is an area where prolife and prochoice can and should cooperate.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Prolife Progressives Affirm All Our Lives
Jen Roth of Turn the Clock Forward has just published A Primer on Prolife Progressivism in the progressive online journal Shared Sacrifice.
Great work, Jen!
At the end of Jen's article is an invitation to join a new initiative for prolife progressives, All Our Lives, that is influenced by both the consistent life ethic (secular & interfaith version) and the reproductive justice movement. If this is what you're looking for, as many readers of Nonviolent Choice are--please join in!
Great work, Jen!
At the end of Jen's article is an invitation to join a new initiative for prolife progressives, All Our Lives, that is influenced by both the consistent life ethic (secular & interfaith version) and the reproductive justice movement. If this is what you're looking for, as many readers of Nonviolent Choice are--please join in!
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Red Envelopes for Life Don't Tell the Whole Story
The Red Envelopes for Life Project asks people to send empty red envelopes to the WHite House with the folliwing written on the outside:
"Dear President Obama:
This envelope represents one child who died in abortion. It is empty because that life was unable to offer anything to the world. Responsibility begins with conception."
Yes, every abortion takes away an irreplaceable child. I'm not disputing that part of it.
But I cannot help but wonder *whose* responsibility begins at conception?
Is all the responsibility going to be heaped upon the pregnant woman, before, during, and ever after birth, same patriarchal set up as usual?
Or is the child's father going to assume his share?
Will the extended family and friends assume *their* share?
Will the schools, workplaces, religious institutions, and other private/civil society institutions assume *their* share?
Most of all, will the larger society assume *its* monster's share of the responsibility? Will it make an all out public commitment to reducing abortion through comprehensive sex education, full access to all prevention options, universal health care, living wage, et al?
And anyway, even if we're just speaking of individual responsibility here--doesn't individual responsibility begin before conception?
Doesn't it also reside in becoming fully informed about sex and reproduction well before one is ever facing the prospect of sexual activity?
About the various prevention options and all their strengths and drawbacks?
About prenatal development?
And doesn't it reside with boys and men as with girls and women?
Don't boys and men have the responsibility to learn that women are fully human beings, not just objects for their gratification?
Don't males have the responsibility to be utterly conscious that their sperm might fuse with ova and result in children they must support before and after birth?
Don't males have the responsibility to do all they can to have mutually consenting, egalitarian, nonviolent relationships with women?
Doesn't the larger society at all levels have the responsibility to support men in unlearning power-over women and learning power-with?
The Red Envelopes only tell one part of the whole story.
"Dear President Obama:
This envelope represents one child who died in abortion. It is empty because that life was unable to offer anything to the world. Responsibility begins with conception."
Yes, every abortion takes away an irreplaceable child. I'm not disputing that part of it.
But I cannot help but wonder *whose* responsibility begins at conception?
Is all the responsibility going to be heaped upon the pregnant woman, before, during, and ever after birth, same patriarchal set up as usual?
Or is the child's father going to assume his share?
Will the extended family and friends assume *their* share?
Will the schools, workplaces, religious institutions, and other private/civil society institutions assume *their* share?
Most of all, will the larger society assume *its* monster's share of the responsibility? Will it make an all out public commitment to reducing abortion through comprehensive sex education, full access to all prevention options, universal health care, living wage, et al?
And anyway, even if we're just speaking of individual responsibility here--doesn't individual responsibility begin before conception?
Doesn't it also reside in becoming fully informed about sex and reproduction well before one is ever facing the prospect of sexual activity?
About the various prevention options and all their strengths and drawbacks?
About prenatal development?
And doesn't it reside with boys and men as with girls and women?
Don't boys and men have the responsibility to learn that women are fully human beings, not just objects for their gratification?
Don't males have the responsibility to be utterly conscious that their sperm might fuse with ova and result in children they must support before and after birth?
Don't males have the responsibility to do all they can to have mutually consenting, egalitarian, nonviolent relationships with women?
Doesn't the larger society at all levels have the responsibility to support men in unlearning power-over women and learning power-with?
The Red Envelopes only tell one part of the whole story.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
We STILL Need Your Volunteer Help in Reducing Abortion!
We are grateful for the responses we received to our plea for volunteers. We now have one volunteer, who prefers to be known only as Anonymous, who is regularly checking the links in the Post Abortion Care, Sexual/Reproductive Health Education, Crisis Pregnancy Support, Shelter, Eco Friendly Living, and Other Ways to Give Life sections of our Directory.
We are also talking with a couple of other people about two specific areas of expansion into non-US and/or non-English resources.
But the task remains huge. We *still* need more pro every life, pro nonviolent choice advocates to step forward. if you are serious about making a difference, here is a very real and concrete way you can do just that.
The following volunteer positions remain open.
---The Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info, is a free, online, global guide to positive resources for reducing abortion.
We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.
Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.
* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.
* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.
* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work. Still needed for the following sections:
--Free & Low Cost Internet & Computing Resources
--Our Affiliations
--Male Responsibility
--All Pregnancy Prevention Methods
--Mother & Child Health
--Parenting/Childrearing
--Adoption, Foster Care, & Guardianship
--Food & Nutrition
--Clothing
--Finances & Income
--Education
--Employment/Career
--Relationships
* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources. Still needed for ALL sections.
Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info ---
We are also talking with a couple of other people about two specific areas of expansion into non-US and/or non-English resources.
But the task remains huge. We *still* need more pro every life, pro nonviolent choice advocates to step forward. if you are serious about making a difference, here is a very real and concrete way you can do just that.
The following volunteer positions remain open.
---The Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info, is a free, online, global guide to positive resources for reducing abortion.
We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.
Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.
* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.
* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.
* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work. Still needed for the following sections:
--Free & Low Cost Internet & Computing Resources
--Our Affiliations
--Male Responsibility
--All Pregnancy Prevention Methods
--Mother & Child Health
--Parenting/Childrearing
--Adoption, Foster Care, & Guardianship
--Food & Nutrition
--Clothing
--Finances & Income
--Education
--Employment/Career
--Relationships
* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources. Still needed for ALL sections.
Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info ---
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Help Reduce Abortion: Volunteer Opportunities
The Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info, is a free, online, global guide to positive resources for reducing abortion.
We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.
Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.
* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.
* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.
* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work.
* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources.
Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info
We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.
Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.
* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.
* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.
* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work.
* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources.
Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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)
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)
Friday, October 24, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, October 10, 2008
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
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.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Maternity Care in the Czech Republic
The organization Normalni Porod, Normal Birth, is sponosoring a petition to improve the largely substandard maternity care in the Czech Republic, including the dishonoring of the midwife profession.
Anyone from any country can sign. All you need to be is concerned that Czech women and babies have the most life-affirming pregnancy birthing alternatives they can have, like women and babies everywhere.
The petition appears in both English and Czech versions. Please click here.
Anyone from any country can sign. All you need to be is concerned that Czech women and babies have the most life-affirming pregnancy birthing alternatives they can have, like women and babies everywhere.
The petition appears in both English and Czech versions. Please click here.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Towards Zero Preventable Child Deaths
A report from the United States Fund for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, presents some very welcome news about already-born children's mortality. Since 1960, the global death rate of children under five has decreased by 60 percent.
In an email announcing the report, US Fund for UNICEF head Caryl Stern says this is reason to redouble systematic lifesaving efforts for the 25,000 children who are still lost worldwide every day. "These children are dying for reasons we can prevent. They do not have to die, but they do. I believe that number should be zero."
To support UNICEF's efforts "towards zero," please visit the US Fund's Donate by Program page.
In a post from January 23, 2008, this blog noted that both global child mortality and abortion rates were declining.
Could it be that measures which benefit already-born kids simultaneously benefit unborn children, and vice versa--contrary to the either/or, zero sum thinking of the US abortion debate and its exports?
And what if the approach of striving for zero preventable child deaths were applied more systematically to abortion and its root causes?
Incidentally, such an approach already meshes quite well with with global efforts to reduce maternal mortality.
In an email announcing the report, US Fund for UNICEF head Caryl Stern says this is reason to redouble systematic lifesaving efforts for the 25,000 children who are still lost worldwide every day. "These children are dying for reasons we can prevent. They do not have to die, but they do. I believe that number should be zero."
To support UNICEF's efforts "towards zero," please visit the US Fund's Donate by Program page.
In a post from January 23, 2008, this blog noted that both global child mortality and abortion rates were declining.
Could it be that measures which benefit already-born kids simultaneously benefit unborn children, and vice versa--contrary to the either/or, zero sum thinking of the US abortion debate and its exports?
And what if the approach of striving for zero preventable child deaths were applied more systematically to abortion and its root causes?
Incidentally, such an approach already meshes quite well with with global efforts to reduce maternal mortality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
