I think this graph, from an upcoming paper in The Journal of Economic Perspectives¹, is interesting.

There’s a “sky is falling” mentality among many so-called marriage advocates. According to their storyline, marriage in America had a golden past until the culturally permissive 60s and 70s, during which drug addicted and probably communistic social scientists convinced legislators to pass no-fault divorce laws, after which divorce rates shot up as parents abandoned their tow-headed big-eyed children to go inhale the demon weed with Abbie Hoffman while having loose and quite possibly lesbian sex with Janis Joplin on top of a LSD-themed painted car while hairy-legged feminists kick men out of the home creating the fatherlessness crisis which has led to the trifecta of evil: skyrocketing divorce rates, Janet Jackson’s nipple ring, hip-hop music.

I never hear any of the divorce chicken littles talk about divorce in non-apocalyptic terms; in their narrative, things are always getting worse. But it’s not the sky that’s been falling since the 1970s - it’s the divorce rate. And to blame divorce on gay marriage - when divorce has been dropping like George Bush’s approval ratings for as long as same-sex marriage has been on the national agenda - is lunacy. On the other hand, marriage rates have been falling.

The dotted lines on the graph show where the century-old divorce trend would have been if not for the recent rise and fall. The question is, will divorce rates return to their long-established slow rise, or will the current fall in divorce rates continue?²

More on divorce in future posts - including a post on that most unjustly framed institution, no-fault divorce. No-fault didn’t cause rising divorce rates in the 60s and 70s; if anything, it was the other way around. Plus, the rise of one great American institution and the fall of another: birth control and shotgun marriages. Woot!

1. ”Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces,” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007. Pdf link to paper. (back)
2. Or it could always level out, I guess, or do any number of inbetween choices. (back)

Different people observe the changing seasons in different ways. For gardeners spring means planting things, for sports fans it means the beginning of the cricket season,* for students spring means avoiding studying for exams, and for Wellington activists spring is celebrated by protesting the conference of the New Zealand Defence Industry Association.

Every year the New Zealand Defence Industry Association holds a forum. To quote from their website:

NZDIA organises the New Zealand Defence Seminars, generally held annually in October/November. This Seminar brings together Australian and New Zealand commercial companies, Asian, Australian and New Zealand Defence purchasing interests together with high level New Zealand Ministerial involvement.

Isn’t nice that they manage to leave off references to the purpose of the ‘defence’ industry is to kill people, and the current wars.

Now obviously on a global scale New Zealand arms trade is insignificant. One of the members of the NZDIA makes grenates in his garage. But that doesn’t make them any less repsonsible for the products they produce. Rakon (while not part of NZDIA), is the most used example of a New Zealand company that makes products to kill people. Their GPS crystals are used in US made Smart bombs, some of which were dropped on Palestine and Lebanon this year (more here.

For the last few years the Defence industry has been held at Te Papa (New Zealand’s national museum. This has angered some people even more - Te Papa’s branding is ‘Our Place.** The Defence Industry conference has become one of the focal points of peace organisation, the other being the war against Iraq. Organising against the New Zealand defence industry brings the links between capitalism and war home.

I’ve been protesting the defence industry conference since 2001. I have to admit that I haven’t had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the protests for the last few years. You organise small protests at things year after year, and in the end you just don’t have the energy to do it again.

So I can say that yesterday’s protest was truly fantastic without blowing my own trumpet (all I did was turn up).

The police were really worried about protesters and had put up blockades all around Te Papa. This made it really easy for protesters outside each entrance to stop those going to the conference getting in or out. There were over 200 people there for most of the afternoon (people came and went), and every entrance to Te Papa was blockaded

In order for this to work the police closed the museum for the afternoon. Which shows where the priorities are, it’s more important that the weapons conference goes ahead than that people can actually use the museum.

What was really amazing about the protests was that no-one got arrested. The trick at a protest is to know your strength. The vast majority of people who have been arrested on protests I’ve been at have got off - they hadn’t done anything wrong. But police arrest people on protests because they can - if the crowd is big enough they don’t arrest anyone because it’ll just make more trouble. It’s often really hard to judge your strength - I’m always very cautious. But this time people knew exactly when to back down - when we were weakening. It was an incredibly well organised and effective action.

*Or not - I could be wrong about either of these facts, since I know slightly more about sports than I do about gardening.

** Personally I don’t think it matters that much where it’s held and I occasionally find the arguments against it being held at Te Papa a little bit precious. It’s not like the museum doesn’t have problems of its own: Women? Kind of absent. Work and the people who do it? Not so much. Struggle over these things? Five minutes in one film.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Amp put up a list of privilege lists on Alas. For those not familiar with the format, most are based on Peggy McIntosh’s White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.

When they stick to the specifics these lists can be illuminating - I’m probably not the only white person who had never had to think about the colour of ‘flesh-coloured’ bandages. But seeing all those lists together raised some real questions for me.

This is partly because I think there’s a real problem with the way privilege is framed in these lists - anything which one group of people have and another doesn’t is considered a privilege. I’m fine with describing a man who doesn’t do his share of housework and has women around him picking up the slack as privileged. I’m much less OK with describing a man who doesn’t have to worry about being raped, if he walks home after dark, as privileged. Not being afraid of rape is a right, not a privilege.

I disagree with the content of some of the lists. I think an extremely large proportion of the average sized person are not true for many women - whatever their size (particularly this one: I do not have to be afraid that when I talk to my friends or family they will mention the size of my body in a critical manner, or suggest unsolicited diet products and exercise programs - I find the idea that ‘average-sized’ women can be free from this fear almost ridiculous). The white-privilege list seems to assume that the white-people in question are middle-class. Some of the non-trans-privilege list also apply to many non-trans women (particularly the stuff about gender and medical care). This is from a social class privilege check-list: “There are places where I can be among those exclusively from my social class” - which suggests he’s never been to a factory, poor neighbourhood, or a prison. I get that it’s a blunt instrument, but a lot of these lists are obscuring more than they’re illuminating.

I also think there’s a real problem in treating different sorts of oppression as if they operate the same way. I’ve written about this before. But these lists, which are all based on each other in some respect really seem to suggest that privilege all works in the same way. For example, representation in media plays a part in most lists, but I would say the role media plays in upholding different oppressions is really different.

But most fundamentally I just don’t have much time for analysing the world through privilege. It so often leads to individualistic non-action - to someone interupting a conversation to say “but even having this conversation is a privilege.” On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know. But you can’t give up privilege as an individual - you can just fight to end it by working collectively.

*********

Note: I’ve had a disturbing amount of support from right-wing assholes for this post. I think they glided over this sentance:

On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know.

I think I should make the point more explicit. I believe that when you interact with someone who has less power and resources tha you do you have a duty not to wield your advantages over them, or to act like you’re superior because you have that power and those resources. Snapping at workers in the service industry? Absolutely unacceptable for anyone who believes in any kind of equal society. Asking why those in poverty get hire purchaces (when you can always get credit from your parents)? Equally obnoxious. Obviously in order to do this, you need to understand what power and resources our society has given you.

However, I believe this step is only a necessary pre-requisite for meaningful political action, it is not meaningful political action in and of itself. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t realise what society gives you, it’s just that realising it doesn’t doing anyone any good at all unless you organise.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

I’m going to be on vacation for a bit over a week, seeing some old friends and some past housemates. I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll have while traveling, but I expect it’ll be limited. I’ve written a few posts ahead, and there’ll be (I hope) posts from Rachel and Maia. But while I’m away, comments that get stuck in moderation may wait longer than usual to get approved, and my email answering may be even slower and less reliable than usual. Sorry ’bout that.

The ninth Carnival Against Sexual Violence is up at Talk About It.

And.

The first Disability Blog Carnival is up at Disability Studies.

Go check ‘em out, please.

Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue:

I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box.

In my experience people who talk about choices are the people who have the most choices to talk about.

The rhetoric of choice erases any sort of meso or macro level understanding of constraints on human behavior. It’s this overly individualistic mentality that drives me nuts.

I’m also tired of graduate students complaining about how poor they are, especially when so many of them have the money to travel abroad, have nice cars, and have an alcohol and weed budget in excess of $50 dollars a week. (If you fit this description, you ain’t poor.) Hell, I wasn’t poor in grad school (well not in my PhD program). I got paid $18,000 a year for a grad student stipend and managed to carved enough adjuncts together to make $30,000. Having grown up without indoor plumbing in Appalachia, I felt like I was in hog heaven. I was even able to buy a condo and a car.

My friend told me about leg waxing in grad school (people in southern Ohio just don’t do such things), and she said it was relatively affordable only $30-50 every 6 weeks. I remember thinking that I could get a pack of 15 razors, for $10.

Yes, this is an all over the place rant, but reading the post will address where the slightly unrelated thoughts are coming from.  I also think people may like to follow the discussion on this post over at Rachel’s Tavern since the discussion over at my place always seems be different from the one here at Alas.

A Little Piece of My Social Class Story

I have experienced a great deal of class mobility in my life, and I am the poster child for the idea that getting a good education can move you up the class ladder. For me this worked in two ways, through my mother’s education and through my own. See my mother’s family is the quintessential white working class family. Almost all of the stereotypes about working class white people apply to them. Unlike her 6 siblings, my mother managed to get a college degree. To this day, I don’t really know how she financed it. My Dad, on the other hand, came from a GI bill middle class family. My grandfather was able to go to college thanks to the GI bill, and he became a chemist, which allowed my grandmother to be a homemaker who raised 4 children. When her children left home, my Grandma went to college and started a career as a teacher. Even though they didn’t grow up well to do, my grandparents were vaulted into the middle class, and my father benefited from it.

It took a long time for my parents to enter the middle class because they came of age in the economic recession era of the 70s and early 80s, so most of my childhood, we were poor and our neighborhood was even poorer. (For those who don’t know, I grew up in Appalachia, southern Ohio to be precise.) But, we had an ace in the hole my Mom’s college degree. After years of substitute teaching, my mother finally got a full time teaching job in the mid-1980s (I think with a pathetic starting salary of $17,000.). Once my father’s income from a small business was added in we were over the $20,000 dollar mark right around the time I finished high school.

I have also benefited greatly from my own education. In spite of going to a low income school and having high school guidance counselors, who were incompetent, I went to college. My parents did a tremendous job of picking up the slack for my less than stellar school. I had the advantage of having a teacher mother, and a father who got me hooked on National Public Radio, sometime around kindergarten. I am not dissing my teachers, but they were expected to perform without many resources that other schools had.

I really noticed the social class gap in junior high and high school after I managed to get myself into this program at Northwestern University (thanks largely to John Smith the county gifted education coordinator and my teacher for the gifted class Mrs. Evans). The program was wonderful, and I got to be around other nerdy kids. However, it would not have been possible for me to go to this program, if I didn’t get need based scholarships (I believe from the University and a local foundation.). When I got there, I quickly realized I was the poorest kid around. In fact, one of the teachers decided that I had a self esteem problem (which is very far from the truth) when I noted that the other kids were way ahead of me. I never thought that I was slow. I knew that these kids were from rich suburbs around Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, and they had schools with many counselors, AP classes, and all of the other advantages that wealthy people had (Most of the kids were also Asian Americans which was another interesting aspect of the camp that I should probably write about someday.). Truthfully, I thought I was pretty damn smart because I was in the same place as these wealthier gifted kids, and I had fewer resources. In fact, one of the things that angered me the most was when I saw other students getting a year’s worth of high school credit for taking these courses and the guidance counselors at my school said that they couldn’t do this because “it had never been done at our high school.”

The Northwestern program along with my other outside of the classroom experiences motivated me to get great grades in high school, and sometime around 10th grade, I started my college search. To make a long story short, I got into the University of Detroit Mercy with a full scholarship, and subsequently earned assistantships, which paid for my master’s degree program at Bowling Green and my PhD at the University of Connecticut. I had to pay small sums for fees and books, but somehow I managed to get a PhD and not pay any tuition. I was happy to earn scholarships, because I was worried that my parents were not going to be able to help me finance my education. (I suppose one of the more ironic twists to this story is that my father’s business took off while I was in college, and my parents moved into a very comfortable middle class status.)

Tying it All Together–My Feminism and My Social Class

Each step in my education has marked a step up the class ladder. With every degree that I earned, I helped buffer myself from poverty. Moving up the ladder like this, gave me a different take on social inequality and ways of fighting it (i.e. socialism, feminism, anti-racism, heterosexism, and so on).

I don’t personally blog much about feminism and body hair or high heels, and I’m not going to put down people who do. However, I do worry that we need to stop framing everything in the language of choice, as it frequently, implies a smorgasbord feminism, where everything is laid out and we just pick from it. When I was young and we were poor, my concern wasn’t about choices I made, it was about opportunities–the opportunity to go to college, the opportunity to play sports, and admittedly, the opportunity to get out of southern Ohio and find a place that had a shopping mall, more than one TV channel, and good schools. Now that I have a middle class job and live in a county that is one of the wealthiest in the US; I have many more opportunities, and with those new found opportunities I get to make choices–whether or not to buy a designer handbag, whether or not to get digital cable and high speed Internet, whether or not to go to dye my hair, and whether or not to live in a wealthier community or a poorer community. Hell, I even get to choose which mall to go to or which gym to be a member of. Having many choices is the product of having many opportunities, and having many opportunities is the product of being a privileged class/group. This is something I have to remind myself all the time, and the best way to do it is to go back to high school and elementary school when my choices were more limited.

Endnote: I appreciate anybody who took the time to read this looooooong post.  I pledge to myself and my readers that I will try to post more short and fun posts. I have been producing long treatises lately. LOL!

From Gateway Pundit (with a curtsy to Crooked Timber):

What universe are these people living in?

This weeks disgraceful liberal surprise- Another outlandish Lancet Iraqi Death Estimate reporting 660,000 have died in the Iraq War.

To give that some perspective, that’s like:

* 3-10 Hiroshima atomic blasts
* 6-20 Nagasaki atomic blasts
* Or 10 Dresden bombing campaigns

I’ve seen a lot of “it’s soooo biiig” critiques from right-wing bloggers this week - but also from a couple of left-wingers. The most intelligent version I’ve seen is the “reality check” press release from Iraq Body Count. All of these critiques exhibit what I think of as “The Great Wall Of China Fallacy.”

Sherri: Some statisticians calculated that the great wall of China is made out of 3,873,000,000 bricks.

Michelle: That’s an absurd number of bricks! Why, if you combined the Empire State Building with Lenin’s Tomb and added on the Pyramid of King Tut, you still wouldn’t have 3,873,000,000 bricks! Clearly, the methodology used by that study is flawed beyond belief.

Sherri: What flaws are those?

Michelle: Weren’t you listening? More bricks than the Empire State Building, Lenin’s Tomb and a pyramid combined!

I hear again and again that it’s absurd to think that the Iraq government could be undercounting deaths by a large degree, but never an explanation of why this is absurd. It seems to me that if you want to measure how well official statistics measure death rates, the way to do it is to conduct a random representative sample study of the population. The foundations of statistics have not, contrary to what many conservatives believe, collapsed; but the Iraqi government has collapsed; surely the former is therefore a more reliable source.

Meanwhile, in Iraq itself, it’s clear that there are a hell of a lot more bodies than have been counted.

Speaking of Lenin’s Tomb, Lenin’s Tomb has a lengthy response to the Iraq Body Count press release, which is well worth reading. Here’s a sample:

The next implication is that “Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq.” IBC doesn’t like this because - well, in fact, they do not say. They simply tell us that this is what is implied. One assumes that they think this is inherently unlikely, but surely they were supposed to be testing that implication? Another version of this argument would be: “one implication of the report is that close to 655,000 people may well have died in Iraq. Furthermore, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a further implication is that close to 600,000 of those have died violently. In Iraq! In one of the most violent societies in the world right now! Could you credit it?”

There is no inherent reason it’s impossible for an incredibly large number of people to have been killed in Iraq, any more than it’s inherently impossible that nearly 4 billion bricks were used to build The Great Wall of China. Large events sometimes happen, and to date the best-conducted study of mortality in Iraq indicates that, measure by mortality, Iraq is one such event.

More links:

An epidemiologist discusses the Lancet study.

Tim Lambert responds to the Iraq Body Count critique (scroll down).

Echidne explains the Lancet study’s methodology. And a similar post from health blogger Stayin’ Alive.

Iraqi blogger Zeyad reacts to the study: “I have personally witnessed dozens of people killed in my neighbourhood over the last few months (15 people in the nearby vicinity of our house alone, over 4 months), and virtually none of them were mentioned in any media report while I was there. And that was in Baghdad where there is the highest density of journalists and media agencies. Don’t you think this is a common situation all over the country?”

Fred at Stone Court points out that the death rate suggested by the Lancet study is hardly unprecedented in history.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments fail to be recorded by official statistics here, try there.]

This was going to be a tale of two protests - since I went on two protests today. But two protests in one day is tiring, so I only have time to write about one of them, more tomorrow.

Clean Start for Cleaners

Today is international anti-poverty day (a concept I find a little weird - today we’ll have international anti-poverty day - tomorrow we’ll go back to ignoring international poverty). The Clean Start for Cleaners campaign organised rallies in Australia and New Zealand today, which is appropriate because to be a cleaner is to live in poverty.

All around the world Cleaners are mostly immigrant and indigenous women. Despite the fact that cleaning needs to be done everywhere, everday and it is completely devalued. The union rate for commercial cleaners is just 70 cents an hour above minimum wage. Cleaners work two or three jobs to get their hours up and have no security of employment. Subcontracting makes it so hard for cleaners to fight for better wages and conditions, because the employer can always hire someone else.

All these points were made at the rally, of course. Plus some interesting facts I didn’t know (90,000 workers got a pay increase when the minimum wage went up -60,000 of them were women - low-wages, poverty and capitalism are all feminist issues). The most powerful speakers were cleaners themselves. There is no service recognition for cleaners, so two women who had cleaned for forty years were still only getting $10.95 an hour. Another woman spoke angrily about always being blamed for being a burden on the tax-payer because she got government assistance - even though she worked over 40 hours a week - she is blamed rather than the employer who won’t pay a living wage.

One of the women also talked about being involved in previous cleaning struggles, and strikes. It must be so hard to have struggled and won, but seen the victory slowly eroded over the last twenty years. Particularly as you’d know that if anything was going to get better you need to fight that fight again.

Now I have some problems with the Clean Start campaign - most notably that no-one really understands what its principles are (and last I heard these principles haven’t actually been translated into the first language of many of the cleaners). But I was really glad to be at this rally, in support of the cleaners.

(Part of my good feeling towards this protest is because I left before Ruth Dyson - (minister of labour) spoke. I needed to get to the other protest, and if you’ve heard Ruth Dyson say once that she’d like to change things, but she can’t - you’ve heard it once too many times).
Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Racists and Republicans (not identical groups, but groups with significant overlap) everywhere are disappointed.

I’m not convinced that there’s a significant voter fraud problem to be solved by requiring IDs. (And if there were, it could be solved with less extreme measures, such as provisional ballots). But if we must have voter ID, it should be combined with free, proactive government programs to get IDs into the hands of every single eligible voter in time for election day. But Republicans have shown zero interest in any anti-fraud program that doesn’t promise to disenfranchise eligible voters.

This is an issue that should matter to everyone who favors democracy; but anti-voter laws like Missouri’s disproportionately effect the elderly, the disabled, and poor people (who are disproportionately people of color). I also wonder if it disproportionately effects transsexuals, not only because transsexuals are more likely to be poor, but in addition because being transsexual could create additional issues in acquiring ID. (But it could be that I’m completely off-base about that.)

From the Court’s opinion:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was Maddox’s first birthday. And also Kim’s (aka Mommy’s) birthday (but not her first). (Today, incidentally, is my nephew Silas’ birthday).

Anyhow, it was party time! Lots more pics below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was 21; I’d been politically active for a couple of years and made some decisions. One was that I wasn’t going to ‘hold paper clips for evil’ (that’s the exact phrase I used in my head). This had been relatively easy, because up till then, apart for some administrative work, most of my earnings had been from babysiting and nannying.* I needed money, so I went to a temp agency to see if I could get any admin work.** I’d thought about what I’d do if they offered me something I found repugnant, and I decided I’d pretend I was busy. I was really excited to get my first job, excited and nervous. I was to type plans for an architecht - that sounded OK I thought, that sounded compatible with my politics. Everything was going fine until I got there and I was given the plans that I was supposed to type.

They were plans for a prison.

I could have left, I would never have worked for the temp agency again, but that wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I wasn’t on the bones of my ass, but I wanted to get more work, I didn’t know what I was doing next and I wanted to work.

That was hardly the only time I’ve done things I disagreed with. I’ve typed up letters telling large corporations how to avoid paying their taxes, I’ve done admin to help a temping agency figure out who they’re employing on the railways (undermining union labour - in many ways this is the one I feel worst about), I’ve put out invitations for an event the WTO was holding, and I’ve even worked for the New Zealand Defence Force. I’ve also been the benefactor of an income stream that makes everywhere I’ve personally worked look as ethical as working full-time for a revolution (as the Red Queen probably wouldn’t say).

So when I say that I am still blogging here, and don’t have a problem with what Amp did, that’s not because I don’t hate the sites that are being promoted. The fact that women’s bodies are a commodity, things to be bought and sold, upsets and depresses me. The fact that some people see my body, the one I live my life in, as an object - scares me.

Instead, it’s because I hate everything. Every object we make, everything we do, is perverted by a system that puts profit before people, by misogyny that is tearing a little bit out of all our souls, by the way we suck the resources, not just out of foreign lands, but from the marrow of the bones of the people who live there - and then tell them what’s wrong with the way that they live, by the many other ways we organise our world and stop people from being frree.

There’s no way out of participating in that - not for anyone.

This probably sounds despairing, it’s not meant to be. Like Natasha from Feminish I believe another world is possible. I just don’t think we bring it about through what we do individually. If we’re going to create that world that I have to believe is an alternative to this one then it’s going to be because of what we do collectively. We each have to play a role in the various machines at the moment, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re strong enough and organised enough from pushing those machines over.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bottom lines. Every one of us will have things we wouldn’t do, actions that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we took. There are always places where we have to take a stand, not because we believe it’ll change the world, but because taking that stand is the only way we can make it clear who we are and what we believe. I understand and respect that for many women linking to this site is something that they can no longer do. I just wanted to try and explain why I felt differently.

* See my analysis wasn’t nearly as developed as my sense of self-righteousness. I have a huge political problem with child-care as a luxury item. I don’t think that if parents want an evening off (or not to be prosecuted after school or during the school holidays - which was a lot of the work I did), they should have to pay through the nose.

** I certainly should have had an analysis of temping agencies as a way of getting around labour legislations and essential to the casualisation of the labour market, but I don’t think I did.

Tomorrow I will have been writing at my blog for a year. I think the hardest thing has been the search for something to write about - it means you have to listen. I used to kind of shut it all out, and I think it’s been a bad year to be listening, particularly as a New Zealand feminist blogger (maybe any year is a bad year). I wrote this, when I was waiting for a verdict when Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton were standing trial for raping Louise Nicholas: police rape trial:

The pattern last two days for me has been dominated by making sure I was listening to the radio every hour, on the hour. National radio marks the hour with their six pips, and I listen to the news, I’m waiting for a verdict. I’m not alone; there are other women listening as intently as me. During a meeting today I popped into someone else’s office to listen to the one o’clock news - another woman came in “is there a verdict?”

We’re reading entrails. I got a text message saying “Jury came out to ask judge as question - good sign i reckon’. I agree and the question they asked was a good one. Each hour the jury’s deliberations stretch on (they’ve spent 8 hours yesterday, and 12 hours today) I wonder if it’s a good sign. “At least someone believes Louise Nicholas” I say, “I hope they stay staunch” whoever I happen to be talking to at the moment replies.

We listen and wait and worry because we believe Louise Nicholas.

I’d been keeping half an ear on the trial of a New Plymouth doctor charged with multiple counts of sexual assault on many different women. I hadn’t been listening to the news every hour on the hour, but I had been waiting since the jury went out on Tuesday. I’d been anticipating that he’d be acquitted. He wasn’t; he was found guilty on most of the charges. Presumably there were so many complainants that the weight of their evidence gave the jury conviction beyond reasonable doubt.*

It’s not that I particularly want him to go to jail. I’m a big Jessica Mitford fan - Cruel and Usual Punishment will turn anyone off jail. The only person I want to go to jail is Clint Rickards. I don’t think jail helps the situation, indeed the believe the only protection we have is speaking the name of rapists loud and clear.

What I want for women who are raped, is that people say to them ‘we believe you and what happened to you was not ok’. In our society the only way to do that is to get a guilty verdict. While I’m sure those not guilty verdicts are hard for the jurors to come to, while I know that some people on those juries believed Louise Nicholas, and the other women, whose names are suppressed. I know that others didn’t believe them. I want to live in a where everyone agrees that getting drunk isn’t consent and sharing a bed isn’t consent, and you don’t automatically consent to boyfriends, police officers, and doctors.

Every conviction is a relief - not just for me but all the women I know and love, and the many more I don’t know. It’s a little bit of hope that our bodies belong to us.

*It’s lucky for certain police officers that any trials that they stand seem to be treated as individual incidents, and the fact that there was a pattern of behaviour is kept from the jury.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Comments on this post are only open for people who are feminist and pro-feminist.

Regarding the sale of Amptoons.com (which I posted about last month), Hugo writes:

Barry, you owe your readers a public forum where you can further explain your decision, and offer those who are stunned and hurt an opportunity to express that to you directly.

It’s the right thing to do, and it needs to happen right now.

Okay. Here’s the same post, this time with the comments open.

* * *

Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.

Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble - we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).

Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time - and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.

Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money - not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”

The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

[Edited to add: A couple of readers have speculated that I didn't know that the new owner would link to porn on his pages. That's not true; I kept the links off of "Alas," but I knew that he would be putting links to porn on his own pages.]

I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” - I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.

I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.

That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.

* * *

New comments from Amp:

I warned the new owner that a likely result of this sale would be many other blogs delinking “Alas.” He said that didn’t matter to him and wouldn’t impede his profit; whatever his business model is based on, he isn’t concerned about that.

My views on porn: I’m not terribly pro-porn; most porn, like most mass media, seems sexist and harmful to me. The arguments that porn prevents rape or is in some way tremendously beneficial to society strike me as not at all supported by the evidence. On the other hand, I’m also not especially anti-porn, in that I don’t see porn as being particularly separate from or different than regular mass media, either in how sexist and racist it is, or in the harm it does. I’m convinced that there are other problems far, far more pressing than porn, and I think what I’ve written about over the years reflects that. If all porn disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I think that sexism, misogyny, and the wage gap would continue uninterrupted.

As I understand it, from the questions I asked before selling “amptoons.com,” the practical outcome of what the new owner does is that when someone searches for “porn,” they’re more likely to find his clients’ sites than other clients’ sites. I’m not thrilled with that, but I also frankly don’t believe it makes the world a worse place if porn company A gets ranked above porn company B in porn searches. Nor do I believe that I could have prevented such manipulations from taking place by refusing to sell the domain.

For me, this compromise is similar to the compromise I’ve made in the past accepting pay for cartoons from small publications who depended on strip club and escort ads for their income; or for being a secretary for various firms on Wall Street (some of those firms do, in my view, far more harm than porn ever has).

I’m not saying what I did was great. It wasn’t. It was a compromise, one that I felt I had no choice but to accept. It’s not something I would have done if I thought I could afford not to do it. It’s a bad thing, disturbing to me, and understandably disturbing (or much worse than disturbing) to my anti-porn readers. I know that some people who formerly liked me will now have lost all respect for me. I understand that, and I regret their departure; at the same time, my respect for them is undiminished.

That said, I’ve never been big on the politics of personal purity. It’s hard to be sure, because I’ve written thousands of blog posts and comments, but I don’t think I’ve ever criticized another feminist for being insufficiently pure in their personal life, their porn use, their income source, or the ads on their blogs.

* * *

One criticism of me that I think is especially strong is that I should have announced the sale of amptoons.com before it happened, to give people a chance to comment and to give other bloggers the chance to delink. It was wrong of me not to do that, and I sincerely apologize for that.

“Alas” reader “Curious” has usefully posted many links to other bloggers criticizing me on this thread. Some of the bloggers are people who have, as “Achilles and Patroclus” says, “the same folks who have been berating Amp for being insufficiently feminist for literally years now”; but others are people who have been quite kind to me over the years, and who I don’t think are knee-jerk Amp-bashers.

* * *

Comments are open for discussion (very much including criticism), but the usual moderation policies apply. Also, I want to remind people that I’m not at the computer all the time, so it may be many hours before I read comments.

This thread is for feminists, feminist-friendly, and pro-feminist posters only.

UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

The New York Times coverage of the new Lancet study of Iraqi deaths, while maintaining an objective tone, is heavily slanted against the study; many of the painfully bad right-wing arguments against the earlier survey are repeated by the Times, usually without rebuttal. For example:

Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.

The implication is that perhaps these new numbers underestimate pre-invasion deaths due to “spotty statistical history.” But the Lancet study does not draw on the counts of Hussein’s government for it’s pre-war mortality estimates, so this is irrelevant.

Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.

The Iraq Body Count tallies only those deaths which are reported by at least two reputable news organizations. No one associated with the Iraq Body Count claims that their results represent “the maximum number of deaths.” From the Iraq Body Count website:

Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.

Back to the Times coverage:

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.

But as this example from The Roper Center’s “polling 101″ illustrates, it’s accepted statistical methodology to extrapolate from small to large numbers - in their example, from 30 purple jelly beans in their sample to the conclusion that there are approximately 20 million purple jelly beans in the huge jelly bean jar.

The new Lancet survey is based on interviews with over 1000 Iraqis. The Times - and all major news organizations - routinely report numbers extrapolated from surveys which interview 1000, or sometimes just 500, people. Mainstream newspaper FAQs about polling methodology (example 1, example 2) suggest that a sample of just 500 is sufficient for surveys representing all Americans.

Of course, the Lancet survey - due to methodological issues having to do with collecting data in a war zone - has a wider confidence interval than most surveys. But that doesn’t mean that the study is unreliable, or its methods incorrect; it just means that the results have a wide confidence interval. We can be reasonably certain there have been between 426,369 and 793,663 excess Iraqi deaths since our invasion. That’s extraordinary, and appalling. If the occupation is intended to protect Iraqis, it is a dismal failure.

Curtsy: Deltoid

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

A new study, due to be published on The Lancet’s website today, has found that there have been 655,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths since the US invaded, compared to how many would have died if previous death rates had continued. The confidence interval is from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. From the Washington Post:

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. [...]

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then — a finding likely to be equally controversial.[...]

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods.[..]

They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate “excess deaths.”[...]

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

As I argued last year, the earlier survey is “controversial” only in the sense that global warming and evolution are “controversial.” The dispute over the earlier study was not a genuine dispute about survey technique; it was more of a dispute between reality and right-wing ideology.

Like the earlier study, this study found that the large majority of Iraqis killed have been male:

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Curtsy: Deltoid.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Or an alternate title could be–”Women are Like Other Animals.” I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is that troubles me about this study. I’m not sure if it is that this seems like a waste of time and research funding or if it is the constant obsession with trying to link all female behavior with biology, in particular hormones.

What do you think?

Hey, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? But y’all still remember what an open thread is for, I’m sure. Remember that self-linking is not only allowed, but encouraged.

CARNIVALS

The F Word presents: The Carnival of Feminists!

African Women’s Blog presents The First African Women’s Carnival

100 Little Dolls presents The Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction And Fantasy Fans

BlackProf.com: A Census of African-American Blogs
Not really a carnival, but it still seems worth spreading the word (or link) around. Professor Overton is asking folks to help him compile a list of blogs “in which at least 20% of the posts address issues of concern to the African-American community.”

NEW TO THE BLOGROLL

New Blog: Our Bodies Our Blog
I’m really excited about this blog, written by one of my favorite bloggers: Christine Cupaiuolo, of the late lamented Ms Magazine blog. Make it a daily read, is my advice.

New Blog: The Silence Of Our Friends
Excellent new anti-racism blog focusing on racism among progressives and lefties.

New Blog: Feminish
Well-written blog by a Euro-feminist. There’s been a really cool series lately about a kick-ass women’s march in France in 1789 (who knew?): Start here and then follow the links at the bottom of the post for more.

* * *

The Republic of T: How The Bush Administration, By Defunding The UN Population Fund While Pushing Abstinence Only, Harms Thousands Of African Girls And Women
This, more than any other calamity, is why I think the marginal difference between having a Democrat or a Republican in the White House matters a lot. Yes, they all suck, but the Republicans - with their seemingly endless willingness to sacrifice science, evidence and black women to the demands of their base - suck worse.

Abyss To Hope: Consent Is Not A Default Condition
Brilliant discussion of “consent,” bouncing off some of the recent “Alas” discussion.

Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty: Critique of the “Privilege” Lists

I just don’t have much time for analysing the world through privilege. It so often leads to individualistic non-action - to someone interupting a conversation to say “but even having this conversation is a privilege.” On an individual level I think it’s important to know where you come from, to know what you’ve been given, and to analyse how you benefit from this system. I absolutely think that everyone has a responsibility to not use the privilege, and power, society gives us - over people we know. But you can’t give up privilege as an individual - you can just fight to end it by working collectively.

Creative Destruction: Do White Men Really Benefit From Privilege?

Feministe: Yes, They Do.

Blackprof.com: Black Folks And The Same-Sex Marriage “Analogy”

Official Shrub.com: A Deeper Look At “Minority Spaces”
What is a minority space? Is it the same as a “safe space”? Are feminist blogs minority spaces? These and other questions…

A few fat-positive articles from the press:

The American obsession with weight loss is unrealistic and harmful

East Bay Express: Fat! Fit? Fabulous!
Peppy article about Health At Every Size activists.

BBC: F*** Off I’m Fat!
Article about an interesting-sounding BBC documentary “by 21-stone comedian Ricky Grover” which takes a fat-activist perspective.

* * *

Fatshadow: I’ve Been Thinking A Lot About The Intersection Of Fat And Disability

Feminist Law Professors: Misogyny Runs Amok In Unregulated Small Courts

A mother of four… went to court… seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

Body Impolitic: “Little Miss Sunshine,” Beauty Pageants, And The Sexual Exploitation Of Children

Pandagon: Right-Wing Censorship Follies!
First, a schoolteacher is fired for bringing children on a class trip to an art museum (scary nudes)! And a PBS Sprout actress is fired by the “Comcast” owned network because she appeared seven years ago in a couple of parodies of abstinence-only education. Oh, and some Fundy mom wants Harry Potter removed from school libraries because it’s too witchy. Plus, Republican Senate candidate Katherine Harris says that her opponent isn’t qualified to be in the Senate because he’s not Christian enough, which is her way of saying that only right-wingers can be real Christians.

Whosedaughter: How Anonymous Donor Conception Harms Donor Conceived Children

Moderately Insane: An Analysis Of Oregon’s Rape Law
Lawyer (and “Alas” reader) Sailorman examines Oregon’s rape law and finds that it is ridden with loopholes for rapists. See also his follow-up post, asking for suggestions for how it should be rewritten.

Bitch | Lab: How Changing Expectations For Marriage (Among Other Factors) Increased The Divorce Rate

TMP Cafe: How Democrats can win without the Southern states.

Republicans Are Hoping Sick, Hateful Appeals To Homophobia Will Save Them From The Foley Scandal
Here, here, here, here, here, and here. As Equality Loudoun, in an excellent post, writes, “we’re getting a good idea of what’s wrong with the moral compass of the anti-gay right. They don’t have one.”

The Republic Of T has many more related links. And see also this related, excellent post…

Box Turtle Bulletin: Homo-Hating Christians Distort Social Science To Claim That Gay Men Are A Danger To Boys
Beautiful example of someone doing the research to debunk the hateful right-wing lies. Curtsy: Pandagon.

Think Progress: Afghanistan Five Years Later

Reappropriate: On Frustration With Dealing With White Liberals

What’s frustrating is that this fanatic adherence to superficial tolerance is almost as close-minded as the most fervent KKK member; so desperately are these Whites afraid of being labelled a racist that even suggesting an open discussion on race terrifies and frustrates them.

Echidne: On The Amish Massacre, And On Hating Girls And Women

Effect Measure: The Amish’s Rational Response To Mass Murder

Their reaction was extraordinary and deserves the praise it receives. At the same time, though, it is a damning indictment of the rest of us, that we should see this perfectly rational act as so unusual.

Title IX Blog: There Should Be Paternity Leave For College Football Players

Molly Saves The Day: A Feminist Reading Of Disney’s The Little Mermaid

Racialicious: Color Blind Casting Benefits Non-White Actor!
It’s sort of a “man bites dog” story.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill: The Ten Most Overrated White People

Let’s Talk Babies: Elective C-Sections Linked With Increased Infant Mortality
But at least some hospitals made more money.

Womens ENews: The Debate Over Susan B. Anthony’s Anti-Abortion Opinions

Ballastexistenz: Regarding “I’d Rather Die Than Be A _____!”

Barbara Ehrenreich: Could You Afford To Be Poor?

Boston Review: Six Ways To Reform Democracy

Reappropriate: Free Yunjim Kim!

Study Finds Daily Show As Substantive As Network News

“Interestingly, the average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories were not significantly different than the average amounts of visual and audio substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart stories about the presidential election,” Fox writes in the study. (Curtsy: Republic of T).

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Sydney’s a jock, that’s all there is to it. She loves running, she loves climbing, she loves lifting big things, she loves swings. Here, she hangs out under my bunk bed.

I love her expression in this photo.

Alas readers who saw Whale Rider might remember Keisha Castle Hughes, she was the young Maori actress who was nominated for a best Actress Oscar for her role as Paikea. It has just been announced that she is pregnant at 16. Span and Cactus Kate (of all people), have already covered some of the ways the coverage of these facts has been extremely offensive. But I want to look at this discourse in a little more detail, because it is pissing me off. From the NZ Herald:

National MP Paula Bennett, a mother at 17, said whichever way you looked at the situation, 16 was far too young to have a baby.

She believed there was no way a 16-year-old had the maturity to cope with the demands of raising a baby.

and from The Dominion Post

Family Planning executive director Jackie Edmond said New Zealand had the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world. She hoped other teens would not want to “copy” the actress.

This level of tsk-tsking has a very clear subtext about young Maori girls who get pregnant. It’s part of a concerted strategy to blame poor people for being poor.

Look I’m a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I’m economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don’t have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

But there’s actually a bigger issue here. Anika Moa has a song on her new album about the abortion she had when her music career was taking off, that she now regrets. She was told from all sides that if she continued the pregnancy she wouldn’t be able to have a music career - that she had to choose.

That’s why I hate the rhetoric of ‘choice’. Women shouldn’t have to choose between being a musician and a mother. Obviously in the months immediately after you give birth you do have physical restrictions on what you are going to do (longer the longer you breast feed). But so? Why does that mean that you can’t make music - and if you make music people want to listen to, why can’t they get to listen to it?

The answer is, of course, ‘capitalism’. I get that - most women do have to make that choice. But the way most people talk about it you’d think these choices forced on us by something people have no control over, rather than our economic system. You’d think that there was some law laid down that once you had a child you couldn’t do anything else, or if you did it would be 100 times harder. The reason that having a child at 16 is so very hard is that having a child is seen as an individualised project. Parenting gets no economic resouces and no support. It’s hard enough to do with a reasonable amount of money - if you don’t have a reasonable amount of money being able to do anything but parent when you have a child is really difficult.

We could organise our world so that parenting wasn’t just supported, but treated as the necessary work that it is. If we did that, if parents didn’t have to work huge amounts of outside hours (or live on the DPB, and all the poverty that that implies), then parenting wouldn’t be the end or your life. Women who were mothers, whether at 16 or 40, could do other things as well, parenting wouldn’t be seen as the end of your life, and your chance to develop.*

Maybe if we lived in a non-capitalist world that valued parenting women would have children young - when they had lots of energy. Maybe women would have them late, because they wanted to grow up first. Maybe women would make a wide variety decisions based from what they want from life.

But until we build that new world I wish people would just stop judging young women.

Note for commenters: This is not the place for a discussion about Keisha Castle-Hughes or her pregnancy - please keep the discussion general rather than specific, or on the discourse rather than the event.

Also published on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Jill at Feministe wrote a good post about abortion called Beyond Legality. She was responding to a fascinating Alternet article, from a hotline which tries to help women get access to abortion:

“Could you ask your friends for $40? If they say ‘no,’ maybe ask for 20 or even 10?” I hear her ask in her calm voice. Later she tells me that this woman has been evicted from her house for lack of rent, and is crashing with her three children at a friend’s. To another caller, I hear her say, “Well, do you have anything you might pawn? Some jewelry? A TV set?” And to another, “Is it possible you could postpone your car payment until after the abortion?”

Laura’s case management is strikingly labor intensive. She averages about 15 phone calls per case — with the client herself, with the various abortion funds, with the clinic that is the potential site of the abortion — whether in the end the woman successfully obtains sufficient funds for an abortion or not.

Jill puts together a really cogent argument about everything which is wrong with abortion access in the united states, but begins:

With all the focus on simply keeping abortion legal, we often miss the fact that access to abortion remains highly limited and even impossible for some women.

I have to confess that I don’t understand abortion politics in the united states. I don’t understand why access is something that you need to be reminded about. Access means whether or not women can get abortions - I think that’s actually the only way to evaluate abortion policy.

Legally abortion is treated as a crime in New Zealand. It is covered under the crimes act and considered a crime except under circumstances:

(1)For the purposes of sections 183 and 186 of this Act, any act specified in either of those sections is done unlawfully unless, in the case of a pregnancy of not more than 20 weeks’ gestation, the person doing the act believes—
(a)That the continuance of the pregnancy would result in serious danger (not being danger normally attendant upon childbirth) to the life, or to the physical or mental health, of the woman or girl . . .; or
(aa)That there is a substantial risk that the child, if born, would be so physically or mentally abnormal as to be seriously handicapped; or
(b)That the pregnancy is the result of sexual intercourse between—
(i)A parent and child; or
(ii)A brother and sister, whether of the whole blood or of the half blood; or (iii)A grandparent and grandchild; or
(c)That the pregnancy is the result of sexual intercourse that constitutes an offence against section 131(1) of this Act [sexual contact with a dependent family member]; or
(d)That the woman or girl is severely subnormal within the meaning of section 138(2) of this Act.

In order to have a legal abortion in this country you have to have two specially licensed doctors verify that you meet those conditions. I don’t have a right to an abortion in this country. But I’d rather have an unwanted pregnancy here than anywhere in the United States.

If I got a positive pregnancy test I’d go to the doctor (that’d be free because I’m pregnant), then I’d go to the local hospital for two seperate appointments (they’d both be free). At these appointments the required number of doctors would sign up that continuing the pregnancy would damage my mental health and we’d be away (98% of abortion in NZ are done under the mental health provisions). It may not be what it used to be, but we do have a socialised health system and New Zealand - and that does far more for abortion access than any statement of rights.

Now I am lucky, I live in a large city, other areas of New Zealand aren’t so well served (this post gives all the details). But New Zealand women who need to travel to get abortions, and can’t afford to, should be able to get money from their district health board or work and income (our welfare service). It’s not ideal, but it’s far better than having someone at the end of a phone line asking you what you could pawn.

In New Zealand we lost the rights battle so concentrated on winning access (which we did), it seems to me that it worked the other way round - and this has hurt reproductive rights in really serious ways.

In the United States we lost on access as soon as the Hyde Amendment was passed. It became clear that the only women who had a right to choose were women who could afford it. Even if Roe vs. Wade were repealed it would be a difference in scale, not a difference in kind - rich women would be able to make it to New York. Maybe publicly funded abortion for all women aren’t winnable in the US now. But maybe they would have been if that had been what abortion rights groups concentrated on since 1973. Maybe access would be more secure too, because all women would feel like they had something to fight to protect, not just the ones with money.

Also posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty.