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.

RHRealityCheck.org: My Posts in the Common Ground Section

How to Stop the Abortion War Killings

Pro-Life, Pro-Contraception, & Pro-Tim Ryan

What the First Wave of Feminism Can Teach the First Wave of Commmon Ground

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.

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.

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

New Scholarship for Pregnant & Parenting Students

The prolife student group at St. Louis University in Missouri is doing something truly deserving of the name prolife. It is establishing an endowed scholarship for pregnant and parenting students.

Now here is a fundraising goal that our readers are no doubt interested in helping the SLU students to achieve. So, why not contribute what you can?

And if your own current school or alma mater does not have help in abundance for its pregnant and parenting students, then it needs to. Right now. Why not raise the issue? Sadly enough, it could be that no one has. Yet.

Whatever its shortcomings in my personal opinion, Feminists for Life does offer an Evaluate Your Campus tool to find out just how friendly or unfriendly your school is to the pregnant and the parenting--and to identify the changes that need to be made.

Speak Out Against Violence to India's Female Babies

The 50 Million Missing Campaign challenges the rampant sex-selective abortion of baby girls in India. It was founded by Rita Banerji, an ecologist protegee of the internationally renowned Vandana Shiva.

Please sign their petition calling upon the Indian government as well as international human rights and governmental bodies to take substantive action.

Some US prolifers speak of sex-selective abortions as "trivial." As appalling as the abortion of girl-children is, it will never be uprooted and abolished until everyone recognizes that the violence and discrimination faced by women who try to resist it is just as appalling.

Mitu Khurana, a physician from Delhi, publicly stated that she was illegally forced by her physician husband and inlaws into a prenatal sex determination test for the twins she was carrying. When the test revealed that the babies were girls, they pressured and harassed Khurana in an effort to make her abort them.

She courageously refused. As she told the Mumbai Mirror, "I chose to escape and am proud to say that I have given birth to two lovely daughters." The story as well as a beautiful photo of her with her two baby girls can be found here.

What is more, she went public and took legal action against her harassers. Fortunately her own parents have welcomed her back home and are standing right behind her and the little girls. If only more Indian women in this situation could have support in choosing life for their girl children! And even with her own parents' help, Mitu Khurana has been subjected to suffering no one should ever have to face. And how to tell two little girls that apparently some of their own family wanted them dead because they weren't boys?

Both Sides of The Question, "What If Your Mother Had Aborted You?"

Frances Kissling, longtime leader of Catholics for a Free Choice, flips around the question that "antichoicers" have asked her for years: What If Your Mother Had Aborted You?"

What if your mother's life would have been significantly happier and healthier if she had not had you? If you as a fetus had the capacity to make decisions, would you have given your life for your mother's life, health and happiness?

Kissling speaks of the miserable conditions under which her own mother conceived, bore, and raised her, and concludes:

As a fetus I would have gladly given up my chance to enter the world and become Frances Kissling to have given my mother a better chance at happiness. Far too much is made of a mother's obligations to her children and far too little of what a child's love for her mother means. If fetuses could love, I think they would be as passionate in defense of their mothers as born children become.

If we are going to imagine, as some do, fetuses as part of the human community, we are going to have to accept that if they could make decisions, they might be as willing to sacrifice for others as we demand that women and only women be.

Kissling is right to challenge the demand for women-only sacrifice. But is it children per se that demand total, all-out, lifetime, self-annihilating sacrifices of women? Is it the fault of the children? Or is the doing of a culture that has too long forced a "choice" between women and their own children, born and already born, and then washed its hands completely of its obligation to fully, actively care for all human beings?

It wassn't right, the male irresponsibility, poverty, stunted life chances, and (no doubt ethnic prejudice) that were forced on Kissling's mother, the daughter herself of a Polish immigrant family. She did not deserve those things. No human does. But would the answer have been for Frances Kissling's life to be taken away even as Frances was beginning?

Why does it have to come down to this, always, always, it seems, when abortion is under discussion--either the sacrificing of the woman, or the sacrificing of the child? How devaluing this setup is to both.

I once heard someone define abortion as the cutting off of human potential, whether before or after birth. By that understanding, our culture aborted Frances Kissling's mother. But why must the solution have been the abortion of Frances Kissling?

If fetuses and women alike were fully embraced as part of the human community--wouldn't they both get sprung from this trap of either-or lethal sacrifice? Wuldn't the community pitch in to first reduce sacrifice on anyone's part to an absolute minimum and then distrubute whatever part it could of whatever is left around as many shoulders as possible?

You're Invited to Sign Our Manifesto

Nonviolent Choice and Turn the Clock Forward have teamed up to sponsor the following on Care2's The Petition Site. Please join us, and thank you! It is vital that all of us who take such an approach to abortion, women's rights, and reproductive justice stand up and be counted, and (we hope!) to get organized for cooperative action.

Pro Every Life, Pro Woman, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto

Petition powered by ThePetitionSite.com

Single Mothers in China

From the New York Times via UN Wire:

Single Mothers in China Forge a Difficult Path.

The pressures on Chinese single mothers to abort and the discrimination they face with their children if they do not illustrate precisely how much ultraconservative values concerning family formation and women's roles can depend on abortion for their enforcement.

Not what anyone wants to hear--I know, I know...

For an Even Bolder Reproductive Health Agenda, Why Not.....

To mark International Women's Day, RH (Reproductive Health) Reality Check and UN Dispatch are teaming up for the salon A New Agenda for Girls's and Women's and Health and Rights.

The salon includes and responds to a (.pdf) report by Adrienne Germain of the International Women's Health Coalition. It urges and contemplates a much improved role for the United States in promoting global reproductive health.

Although the US government has yet to catch up to them, the salon commentators demonstrate just how far global reproductive health advocacy has progressed over the years and decades. No one reductively blames and scapegoats poor women of color's fertility for starvation and environmental destruction; quite the opposite. The agenda is broad and comprehensive and thoroughly feminist, solidly grounded in the human rights and needs of women and girls. In other words, it represents an aspiration to reproductive justice for all.

While Germain's report and all the salon panel members appear to take an abortion-rights stand, they do not fixate on that issue, let alone to the detriment of all the others. They attend to the "other" issues--measures which, incidentally, whether in effect or by intent have the power to reduce abortion, such as improved contraceptive access and expanded, comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention programs.

Former and longtime Catholics for a Free Choice leader Frances Kissling does pose this question of Germain's report: "Is This a 'Bold' Plan?" She concludes: "It is a good plan for the 20th century, but I say let's be really bold and move to the 21st."

Why doesn't she does consider Germain's a bold and current enough plan? In part:

Adolescent sexuality is not just "going to happen"; it has its place in adolescent life. Birth control and sex education for adolescents should not just be there as an antidote to the disease of adolescent sexuality but as an aid to healthy and responsible adolescent sexual expression. Ditto on abortion. I note the word appears once in Germain's agenda while we all know anti-abortion moralizing is one of the key problems in including abortion services and information in sexual and reproductive health programs.

I agree with Kissling that access to birth control and comprehensive sex education should not be simply looked upon in terms of a zeal to avert catastrophe. Of course it is essential for them to protect young people (and not-so-young people) against negative or undesired outcomes. But birth control access and sex education at the same time should at the same time actively address the very real and human--yet too often neglected-- need to cultivate the nonviolent giving and receiving of sexual pleasure.

But abortion? It's something different altogether. That pesky issue of taking early life--or potential life, in the estimation of some--is just too inescapable. Not to mention the reality that so many women resort to abortion because they have been denied sexual/reproductive choice to begin with...among other distressing facets of many women's abortion experiences.

It's not just that same-old same-old Bush administration "anti-abortion moralizing" that seeks to keep abortion advocacy out of a global reproductive health and rights agenda.


What would a really bold, 21st-century--and beyond--agenda be? One that joined both prochoice and prolife women's and girls' rights advocates in deliberately, consciously, seriously making abortion obsolete as possible, through social progress to alleviate its root causes.

This is precisely what Ms. Turn the Clock Forward evokes in the name of her blog.

So much that could be done in this area is going undone, overlooked, neglected.

Can we begin to imagine a world where abortion for the most part is regarded as a barbaric, violent, outmoded solution to human problems, where better solutions exist and are readily accessed?

I don't think it's a matter of whether that world can be made a reality. It's a matter of whether enough individuals and institutions will set their sights and their persistent deeds on it.

Who knew, forty years ago during my smoke-filled, ashtray-dumping childhood, that another life-denying practice--tobacco use--would be today so successfully reduced in the United States? Not simply through entreaties to individual behaviorial changes, but through institutional challenges to the tobacco industry, which are now being sought worldwide through instruments such as a global tobacco treaty.

So why not approach abortion in a parallel way, for real, not just in rhetoric? Dare I say that would make for a genuinely, radically bold 21st century reproductive justice agenda?

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.

This Is Womanhood?

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

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

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

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

I can only say, how depressing. How confining.

ProLife Feminism Yesterday & Today Gets Another Great Book Review!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Expanded: Our Child Care Resources

We have just expanded our resources on Child Care (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/employmentcaree.html#care.html)--also known as day care, childminding, or child creches--in the Employment/Career section (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/employmentcareer.html)of our Help With Crisis Pregnancy & Beyond pages (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/crisisand beyond.html). We also have a little material on child care for college and university students in the Education section (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html)of the Crisis Pregnancy & Beyond pages.(direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/crisisand beyond.html)

Before, we just had a few US child care resources, starting there because although we get an increasing number of visitors from all over the world, most are from our home country. Now we have resources from many more countries, although our listing is not yet complete, and for that we apologize and invite your input.

Throughout the world, safe, high-quality options in child care are increasingly a must for gender equality and for the economic survival of families. Whatever the legal status of abortion, the lack of good, free or affordable child care choices that fit the needs of various families is a contributing factor to its incidence. The shameful situation in the US is but a case in point.

Have recommendations for our Child Care resources? Please email them to editor@nonviolentchoice.info We are grateful for any help!

Looking for the "Third Way" & RIP, Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007)

The Chicago Tribune printed this Nonviolent Choice letter in response to an article about US Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). The article discussed his change of heart from prolife to prochoice after a friend who ran a children's home asked him to listen to young women's horrific pregnancy stories.

The letter of response says, in full:

THOUGH OTHERS WHO identify themselves as pro-life often savage Sen. Dick Durbin for his struggles with the abortion issue, I do not. Our current political system forces thoughtful, compassionate people to "choose" between the woman and the child. Even more horrifically, this "choice" is inflicted on the very girls and women who every day confront the pregnancies that turn their lives inside out and upside down. I hope we can all work together to find what has been called the "third way," one that compassionately embraces both mother and child. And I hope both Sen. Durbin and his pro-life critics can cooperate on this point, because the stakes are the lives of human beings before, during and after birth.

MARY KRANE DERR, EDITOR / Nonviolent Choice Directory

The "third way" mentioned here is that named by former African National Congress MP (Member of Parliament) and noted South African musician Jennifer Ferguson. Despite a 1996 ANC directive to vote for legalized abortion on request, Jennifer, like many of her ANC colleagues, conscientiously objected. Over 100 brother and sister ANC reps walked out on the deciding vote.

Jennifer, a woman who knew in her own flesh about the trauma of abortion, abstained, explaining, "I was searching for the third way, the one that could compassionately embrace both mother and child." The book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition proudly includes a chapter on Jennifer and her courageous, mindful abstention.

Another political leader who embodied the "third way" on abortion was the just-assasinated former prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007). Even though she evidently was not immune from the temptations of wealth and power, Bhutto deserves all praise for her brave and outspoken dedication to women's human rights. Among many other accomplishments for the cause of women, Bhutto outspokenly carried, birthed, nursed, and raised her children in the face of widespread prejudice that motherhood--not to mention femaleness--weakened her and made her unfit to lead a Muslim nation, one of the largest countries on Earth. She even survived, with her baby, an opponent's calculated teargassing while she was pregnant.

Bhutto was responsible for Pakistan's Lady Health Workers Programme, which now reaches 50 million poor citizens with basic primary health care measures, including family planning services. In her keynote address to the 1994 United Nations population conference, Cairo, Egypt, Bhutto expressed her opposition to abortion as lifetaking even as she defended family planning and other basic reproductive rights. Again, ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition proudly includes a chapter on Bhutto, including this groundbreaking speech.

Benazir, sister, may you rest in the peace denied you in the moment and manner of your death, and may your children be spared the violent ends that you and others in your family have met.

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

Under Threat: College Women's Right to Nonviolent Choice

Women in college or university are at particular risk of unintended pregnancy and abortion. So many schools have practically nothing available or publicized to help pregnant students carry to term and then carry out their own decisions for parenting, adoption or some other care option for their children. Many even sabotage the educations of pregnant or parenting women, by expelling them, or driving them away by not offering enough financial aid, for example.

That's why the Nonviolent Choice Directory has an Education section (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html if the link doesn't work) and why we just added some more resources to it...not to mention other pages to help get through a crisis pregnancy and beyond, and to prevent crisis pregnancy in the first place.

We have started a list of colleges and universities that have specialized programs to assist pregnant and parenting students. Kudos to the schools that have these programs...but...the list is pathetically short. Every school, at every level, with students past puberty needs to have such a program! And, of course, comprehensive sex education and prevention efforts...

If you are a US citizen, please send your politicians a letter in support of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Students Act (which was introduced into the House by sister Polonian Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio). This will help to create more of these urgently necessary pregnancy and parenting programs at the college/university level. Compared to the need, it's a drop in the bucket, but it's better than nothing, and it's a start.

Please also give them a shout about the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act. The availability of reduced-price contraception for college students and lowincome women is under attack, and if the assault brings down this option, more abortions and other harms are practically inevitable.

Please stand up for college women, and for their already-conceived kids!

In Case Anyone Was Wondering.....

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

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

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

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

You Are 100% Feminist

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

Are You a Feminist?