Still More Debate on Contraception

ben d. returns to continue our lengthening debate on contraception. He raises the question of whether hormonal contraceptives actually work by causing very early abortions. And I have my reasons for thoroughgoing skepticism.

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.

Are Feminists for Life Really Feminists? Part Two

On Feminists for Life (FFL) and its invocation of suffragists on abortion:

In her Mother Jones article, Emily Bazelon is right on the mark that early feminists saw abortion as a sign and symptom of women's socially mandated powerlessness. They also saw it as an unjust violence against unborn children's lives.

Although some people today certainly oppose abortion for despicable, hypocritical, decidedly not "prolife" reasons of wanting to control women: some of us oppose it for an updated, evolving version of this pioneering analysis.

The founders of the Nonviolent Choice Directory & Blog have thoroughly researched and documented this early feminist history and its continuing relevance in the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, and elsewhere.

And for the most part, FFL's invocation of suffragists is grounded in this research. Contrary to Bazelon's assertions, it is not "context-free" nor irrelevant to present-day issues.

And what is the source of Bazelon's belief that early feminists opposed abortion because they "feared it would blur the line between a 'fallen woman' and a 'lady'"?

Contrary to the stereotype that they were prudes, early feminists of diverse kinds were determined not merely to blur but dismantle that line. They thoroughly exposed and challenged the sexual double standard that harmed and stunted all women (and still does!) by harshly separating out the purportedly "good" from the purportedly "bad" women and covering over the complicity and responsibility of social institutions in women's unjust, preventable sufferings.

This resistance to the double standard figured enoromously and continuously in their words and deeds of resistance to abortion. As the book also documents, in reprints of their own profuse writings.

Are Feminists for Life Really Feminists? Part One

In the January/February 2007 issue of Mother Jones, Emily Bazelon's "Suffragette City" examines whether the avowedly prolife organization Feminists for Life of America can authentically call itself feminist as well.

Bazelon sounds more open-minded and fair than some journalists who have taken on the question, and more power to her for that. But she rests her case on the same problematic conclusions that for decades have staved off the possibility of prochoice feminists engaging with, understanding, and cooperating on common-ground issues with genuine women's rights advocates who oppose abortion.

--She criticizes the group for "its context-free quotes from suffragists. (Anthony and her contemporaries didn't oppose abortion for the reasons that the pro-life movement does today. They considered the procedure a symptom of women's powerlessness, and feared it would blur the line between a 'fallen woman' and a 'lady.')"

--Bazelon finishes with a statement from Frances Kissling, longtime head of Catholics for a Free Choice, regarding FFL's policy/nonpolicy on pregnancy prevention methods: "Feminists for Life want to present themselves as progressive women, whose only interest is protecting women. But when you hear them talk about contraception, it gets weaselly."


I will do my best in some forthcoming posts to address these criticisms. I have been involved in prolife feminist work for over twenty years--including work as a member of Feminists for Life, but on certain points and increasingly a discontent and dissenting member.

"Not Traditional"

Sacred Circle, a national resource center for healing violence against Native women, often insists:


Violence Against Native Women Is Not Traditional.


Indeed, though few Euro-American feminists realize it today, the women's rights movement in this country, including the struggle to abolish and heal violence against women, has direct roots in at least one group of First Nations, the Haudenosaunee ("People of the Long House") Six Nations Confederacy of Upstate New York (the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora).

Anglo early feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both astounded and inspired by the much greater freedoms that Haudenosaunee women enjoyed within their own cultures, not the least of which was freedom from sexual coercion.

To learn more about Native American beliefs in everyone's right to bodily integrity, and about this underrecognized origin of US feminism, you can:

--Read ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, which thoroughly documents these matters.

--Visit the website of Sacred Circle and order from their publications catalog, which offers educational materials for both Native and non-Native people who want to both understand and take action on the current horrific problems of violence against Native women.

Violence Against Native American Women

The freedom to live without sexual assault is one of the most basic nonviolent choice rights.

Amnesty International USA recently published the report Maze of Injustice--the Failure to Protect Indigenous Women Against Sexual Violence in the USA. It found that Native American women were 2.5 times more likely than other American women to have sexual violence inflicted on them. Yet perpetrators of violence against Native women were far less likely to be brought to justice.

Why is this so? Along with the pervasive denial in Anglo-dominant US culture that women are human, Native American women are struggling with the fallout from centuries of colonial occupation and racism.

To read the Amnesty report and take action:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/Womens_Human_Rights/Join_Voices_with_Native_American_and_Alaska_Native_Women/page.do?id=1021163&n1=3&n2=39&n3=1410

The Amnesty materials include links to Native American shelters and efforts to end violence against women. Here are two ways you can aid their work most effectively:

1. Donate generously and regularly to one or more of these courageous but chronically underfunded organizations.
2. Write your representatives (Amnesty has a sample letter) to demand an increase in funds under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today (Second Edition)

The Nonviolent Choice Directory and Blog grow directly from the anthology book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition.

So please don't mind a bit of Shameless Plug. If you're interested in the website and blog, this book will likely interest you, too.

The book thoroughly documents in their own words the consensus on abortion of diverse feminists past and present, from the 18th-century Anglo-Irishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft to the recent Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Muta Maathai.

This is the consensus that abortion is violence against unborn humans caused by the violent denial of authentic, peaceful, voluntary sexual and reproductive choices to female humans.

A thought-provoking read for people of all opinions on abortion, full of neglected but vital herstory and current perspectives. Goes way beyond and deeper than the now, alas, standard war-to-the-death of woman-v.-fetus. Because nobody wins in that war, either, just like in Iraq.

To learn more about the book, please click here.