From Tapped, Dana advises pregnant workers to give written notice… of pregnancy:

That’s one of the lessons in Sue Shellenbarger’s latest Wall Street Journal column, which reports that pregnancy bias complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 14 percent last year to 5,587, a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. One woman in the publishing industry was fired while she was pregnant, supposedly for poor performance, yet those issues had never come up prior to her pregnancy. She wanted legal redress, but couldn’t prove in writing that her bosses actually knew she was expecting. So consider sharing your big news over email.

Shallenbarger also writes that many American women, until they get pregnant, have no idea that they are entitled to no paid leave under current law. Indeed, a study from Harvard University last year found that of 168 nations worldwide, the United States is one of only four whose government doesn’t require employers to provide paid maternity leave. The others are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

Has anyone else found that the story of the mutilating gynecologist terrifies them beyond all proportion to the story? I am shocked by the vividness and durability of my reaction to it, given how inured I am to other news stories.

People in other threads commented that the article reads like a horror movie, and I think there’s good reason for that. This is the stuff of horror stories. And like horror stories, it functions by tapping into shared anxieties — in this case anxieties to which I think I am particularly vulnerable, as someone who has always been easily upset by things relating to health and medicine.

Still. I’m trying to remember the last time I felt haunted by a news story, to the extent that I felt nauseous and lines from it echoed in my head all day. I was pretty terrified by the anthrax scare right after 9/11 related to the reports of the “plume of white dust,” illogical as it was (I was close to the towers, and also 19 and stupid). It must have happened since then, but I can’t remember when.

I hate that my terror would no doubt satisfy the sociopathic gynecologist, but I’m not going to waste time berating myself for my visceral response.

Oh my fucking god. There are no words.

His name is Graeme Reeves. He was an OB-GYN. One of his patients wanted to have a small pre-cancerous lesion on her labia removed. As she slipped into unconsciousness from the anesthesia, he leaned in and whispered:

“I’m going to take your clitoris too.”Huh? I know it’s pointless to ask, but why???? Well, Graeme Reeves was not your garden variety Law & Order psychopath; he is a murderer who left dozens of women permanently injured. He removed their organs for no reason, he ignored the cancer growing inside a woman’s cervix for no reason, and way back before any of this, in 1996 he withheld antibiotics from a dying mother against the pleas of nurses so that she eventually died for NO. REASON. How the fuck did this happen? Was none of this considered to be a crime?

Well, uh, no. Graeme Reeves does not appear to be in jail. And although he is clearly a sick sick sick sick sick sicko, hundreds of colleagues managed not to see or notice anything about this behavior or reputation or files or employment history that warranted a second look. What is that about?

Via ginmar who should consider herself welcome to post in my threads.

I have a couple of diehard Republican friends, but they’re exceptions; most of my friends would no more vote for a Republican than they’d dine on a slow-roasted digital alarm clock. A more active controversy, among my friends, is whether to vote for a major party candidate at all; many feel that it’s wrong to vote for Bad Candidate when the opponent is Marginally Worse Candidate. Instead, they’ll be voting for third party candidates like Cynthia McKinney. (Edited to add: By the way, if you’re a leftist or a progressive, I highly recommend clicking over and listening to McKinney’s speech — if you’re a progressive who has been following mainstream politics, listening to McKinney really is like breathing fresh air for the first time in a long while.)

I have a lot of sympathy for that view. I was an ardent Nader supporter, and if there were a third-party movement going on right now that seemed vital and growing — a third party movement that I believed could eventually overthrow the USA’s appalling two-party system — I’d seriously consider working for it. I find the anti-democratic laws and tactics designed to keep minor party candidates off ballots disgusting and an insult to human liberty. And, if the vote in Oregon ends up being meaningless (which is often is), I probably will vote for whoever the Green Party candidate for president is.

Right now, however, the third-party movement doesn’t feel to me like it has much life to it. And the differences between a Republican and Democratic president — although much narrower than I’d like — can matter a hell of a lot. Which I was reminded of today by this post on rhrealitycheck, by Florence Machio, who lives in Kenya:

With a maternal mortality in my country high, the World Health Organization has introduced many strategies that could reduce the many deaths. What is often overlooked is the fact that African women are intelligent enough to make their own choices, if those choices are indeed available.

The choices begin from negotiating for sex, using contraceptives and carrying a pregnancy especially where incest and rape are concerned. One of the statements made by Dr. Jean Kaggia, an anti-choice advocate from Kenya, at the Congress was that we needed more money to change behavior. How does one propose that a married woman should change behavior when her husband is the one who makes the decision of whether to go to hospital or not or worse still whether to use a condom or not?

Kenya is a country with 42 tribes, which have varying cultural beliefs — meaning we can’t give a blanket solution to everyone.

I remember during the 2004 elections, many people in my country knew more about the politics of the US than knew what was happening in their own country’s economy. I cannot claim to know exactly why Kenyans did not particularly like the reelection of Bush. People like Dr. Joachim Osur and other doctors who deal with family planning issues in Kenya and Africa would have much preferred a Democrat to win the election. For me it meant that we had to suffer another four years of this policy, which, interpreted by the Bush administration, meant a cut in spending on family planning.

Thanks to the global gag rule, many organizations that provided family planning services had to denounce abortion in writing and also not provide post abortion care. Most of them refused for good reason — but that meant that they lost critical funding for their organizations and the eventual result was a close down of clinics in major districts in the country. This in itself affected many women and of course ended up reducing the gains that had been made over the years in family planning and reduction of unintended pregnancies.

I always say this — give an African woman or any other woman choices and that will go along way in reducing unsafe abortions that have taken away the lives of many of my sisters, mothers and daughters on the continent.

When it comes to reproductive health issues like the global gag rule, or funding UNFPA, the difference between having a Democratic and a Republican president will determine if countless woman get the medical care and reproductive choice they need to make their own choices, and — in many cases — if they live or die. Although I respect those who vote for third-party candidates, I’ll be urging people to vote for the Democrat — whoever the Democrat is — largely because of this issue.

In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has been lighter than usual since October. Well the main reason for that has been because I’m pregnant. I told my co-bloggers, so they wouldn’t think I was abandoning the site..

Now that I’m in just out of month 4, I’m finally happy to report that my life doesn’t revolve around the fear of throwing up on strangers. :) For a while, from months 2-4, I was battling morning sickness, and the usual first trimester sleepiness. I’m still concerned about a few things like the fact that at almost 19 weeks I weigh the same as I did when I got pregnant. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about pregnancy is the way it has altered my eating habits and my metabolism. When I was in the throws of morning sickness, for some unknown reason the more unhealthy the food the more likely it was to stay down. I’ve never eaten so many McDonald’s Big Mac’s in my life. What’s even funnier is the fact that I ate that kind of food and lost 6 pounds. I felt like I couldn’t possibly eat enough food to maintain my weight, and I was even more shocked when I read that I was supposed to eat 2600 calories a day (300 extra calories per fetus). I’ve always been a person who loves eating and food, and by medical standards I’m in the overweight category, but suddenly, I didn’t want to eat, and these two little fetuses were performing liposuction on my thighs and butt. My husband kept joking about the fact that I had the incredible shrinking booty, which he thought was bad and my mother and brother thought was great. (Now, there’s a cultural difference if there ever was one–West African ideas about booty beauty and White American ideas about booty beauty.) Fortunately, I’ve gained my 6 pounds back, but I seem to be stuck right at the same weight. I promise I’ll write more about this since it really seems to be the one issue that is bothering me the most–I keep wondering how I’m going to gain 30 lbs in 20 weeks.¹

Of course, I’m going to write about the pregnancy because there are so many juicy issues. The gender issues are obvious, but other issues like body image (which I alluded to above), medicalization, racism, and the rampant classism/materialism that surrounds birth and children. I already have some good stories to tell already, so be prepared. Plus, when the little ones are born, I’ll even have some baby blogging to do.

1. For those who don’t know the weight gain recommendation for twins is higher, but doctors also seem to be all over the place in terms of what they suggest. My OBGYN suggested a 44lb weight gain for a woman of my height who is of average weight. Since I’m overweight, she suggested 30-35 lbs. (back)

The week after I first visited Rimutaka, I visited Arohata - the women’s prison. I’d gone to the prison half a dozen times already, to drop off books, letters, newspapers and visitors forms; I knew the prisons were different. At Arohata they weren’t set up for supporters. At Rimutaka there were signs, forms and boxes for anything we might want to do. At Arohata they weren’t as rigid, but after a week they wouldn’t let us drop any more newspapers off, because they’d never seen this number of newspapers.

I got to Arohata half an hour early - just like I did at Rimutaka. When I rang the bell they told me that visiting didn’t begin for half an hour and I’d have to wait outside. About ten minutes later another woman came, she was Maori and there to visit her mother. She’d come down from Palmerston North and we talked a little bit as we waited. I leaned against the fence, and she sat on the grass. She was pregnant, and needed to pee. I wanted to fight for her to get in and get a proper seat, but I’d already spent long enough in the prison system to know that it would just make me tired and get us nowhere.

Theoretically women prisoners on remand have much more visiting time than male prisoners on remand. Visiting time was in two hour blocks, rather than one hour blocks. All visiting time is cut into by the slowness of the prison system, but at the men’s prisons they at least seemed to be expecting visitors. At the women’s prisons they didn’t even realise we were coming, until visiting time began.

As I said, from 12pm Monday 15 October to 4.01pm Thursday 8 November my happiest hours were spent prison visiting. While I was visiting I knew that they were really there, and that they were still them and fears that I couldn’t even acknowledge dissipated.

But visiting at Arohata made me so sad, sad and angry, because the other female prisoners didn’t seem to get visitors. The woman I’d waited on the grass with was the only other visitor the day I was there, and when other friends had visited the day before, none of the other remand prisoners at Arohata had got visits.

There are fewer remand prisoners at Arohata than there are at Rimutaka (18 vs 81 in the 2003 prison census). There are only three women’s prisons in the country, so women as far away as Gisborne would be held in Wellington. But even taking the numbers into account there were five times as many visitors over two days at Rimutaka, than two days at Arohata.

I don’t think that I can extrapolate out total support from two days of visiting, but there’s other evidence that implies this is a pattern. Three times as many women as men had custody of children immediately before they were locked up (35.5% vs. 12.1%). For men, almost 80% of the children were looked after by their partner or ex-partner. Whereas for women less than 25% of children were looked after by their partner or ex-partner (full figures here. Instead it’s immediately family, larger whanau or CYFS.

Women do the work when men go to prison, and when women go to prison there isn’t necessarily anyone to fill the gap.

I received an email from a reader about a round table on the Tavis Smiley Show. Apparently, Tavis will have a panel discussing Thomas’s book and his appearance on 60 Minutes. Panelists are Marc Morial, President and CEO of The National Urban League, Princeton Professor Cornel West, and Columbia University President, Farah Jasmine Griffin. If you are in New York, the Tavis Smiley Show airs at 12 midnight on PBS.  If you are in another market, I’m not sure of the time, but you can check you local PBS station.
Did anyone else see the 60 Minutes interview with Thomas?   I thought he came off as really bitter.  He kept using the anchor’s name in a pejorative way.  It was very uncomfortable from my vantage point.  For those interested in abortion and sexual harassment issues, Thomas made the claim that the controversy surrounding his appointment was really about abortion.  The panel on the Tavis Smiley Show will discuss this issue in some depth.

I’m not going to return to substantive blogging, but I’m going to experiment with doing occasional link posts, and posts that are composed entirely of quotes. Like this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Health Select Committee has just recommended extending paid parental leave to six months, to encourage breast feeding.

As a supporter of paid parental leave (or, more accurately, as someone who believes that paid parental leave doesn’t go nearly far enough and that parenting should be resourced as the work it is) I should be happy.

Here’s the reason the Health Select Committee has decided breastfeeding is important:

The promotion of breastfeeding for at least the first six months, and preferably for the first year, is widely recommended, as it has an important protective role against obesity during childhood and adolescence, and may also protect mothers against obesity and diabetes.

Apparently women are en-slimmening machines. The main value of our breast-feeding, indeed of parenting in the first six months, is preventing fat cells.

This is from the report into obesity and type 2 diabetes; I may write more later. Although what I actually want to do to the report is to batter it, deep fry it, and then slather it with icing.

I wrote this after reading the various threads that were spurred by the late-term abortion ban.

Pro-Life Patter

what if he’s
the next
Mozart
if he cures cancer
could end
racism
have you
thought about
adoption
what if
you want
children someday
if not now
when?

you should
be grateful
you’re the
kind of
person who
should be
having children
there are children starving
in China
& some people can’t
have kids
of their own

real mothers
give up everything
you’re a murdering
slut you bitch
cunt spread your
legs should be
raped i’ll kill
you myself i ought
to pull you apart
joint by joint
and see
what you think of
bodily integrity then

abortion is
genocide
it’s eugenics
Margaret Sanger was
a racist
it’s a modern
Holocaust
doctors can
be wrong
have you seen
its tiny
hands
feet
heartbeat
how can you end
a tiny life
what if mary
had said no what if
your mother
had been
pro-choice?

sometimes you have to
stand up take
responsibility
be an adult
pay for playing
you said yes
once you let
him come it’s your
problem now don’t
come crying
to me for
sympathy
you spread
your legs and now
you have to
handle it
yourself.

Some paparazzi took pictures of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal breastfeeding her child in public. Somehow I missed this, when the “scandalous” photos were taken a couple weeks ago. They are posted all over the place at entertainment blogs. I thought I would pick out a few choice comments from sexist pigs for your reading (dis)pleasure.

Here are some comments from A Socialite’s Life

Here’s one from Conrad:

I am sure plenty of women find this beautiful, but thats a beauty that needs to be shared between mother and child in a quiet, discreet location. She had to know 1 million plus ASL readers would be viewing this spectacle. I never had much of an opinion of her, but now I know she’s an animal. It reminds of that childhood question - “what’s grosser than gross…”

Another from What Betheny said:

Gross. I like her, but this picture is gross. There are more private ways to breastfeed your baby in this country. We’re not living in Africa. I can’t stand the self-righteous breastfeeding moms who just show absolutely everything without thinking for one minute that just maybe not everyone is comfortable with seeing their body parts and their child sucking off of them. It’s a personal bond between you and your baby, so make if personal.

Now here is the good news: most people on the thread were supportive (at least the last time I read the comments a week ago).

Then, you have this site, where they put up a not safe for work warning and blurred out her breast (But apparently the pictures in this post are A-OK). Here are a few of the comments (out of 490+).

From eva:

hmmm… imo if you want to breastfeed in public, pump your tits at home, bottle it, and feed them that way.

From combustion8:

shes so ugly… look at that puppy sag.

From Frenchie:

Ewww…not good. She could have covered up a bit with a blanket. I know it’s a natural act but that is pretty tacky. Her tit hanging all over the place is not natural. She should be more conscientious of not offending the general public by being more subtle.

From Rebecca:

Discusting! I’ve seen women do that before but at least they had the decency to cover their breasts. What a freakin peasant! Yes breastfeeding is natural but so is urinating and defecating, does this mean we’ll catch people doing that in public too? This is what I call no self-respect. (Gee where has Rachel heard this one before.)

I couldn’t bare to read through all of the comments. This thread had many breastfeeding defenders even though it wasn’t quite as pro-breastfeeding as the other thread.

The fact that this was covered as a controversy reflects anti-breastfeeding attitudes. A few sites treated it as such, and I found a few that put disclaimers admonishing people to behave. A Hollywood actress is feeding her child in a public place should be a non-issue, and I even hesitated to post this. However, people do need to be reminded that many anti-breastfeeding attitudes are puritanical, sexist, and unhealthy. I think the number of commenters who feel the need to personally attack Gyllenhaal commenting on her appearance, her sexuality, and her morality (or supposed lack there of) is indicative of why breastfeeding is such an important feminist issue.

Shout Out to Jennifer at Black Breastfeeding Blog!

Women’s deaths are a useful goad for keeping other women in line.

Discuss.

Via Mahablog and Lawyers Guns And Money, I read this interesting Washington Post article about a split in the “pro-life” movement over the “Partial Birth Abortion” ban.

What’s interesting is that some of the pro-lifers are admitting to the truth about the Partial Birth Abortion ban (PBA ban) — truths that leaders of the pro-life movement have been blatantly lying about for years. In this story, pro-lifers admit:

• That a PBA ban will not prevent a single abortion.
• That the alternative procedures are more dangerous for women.
• That some alternative procedures doctors will use now are if anything more brutal from a fetus-centric point of view.
• That PBA bans have nothing to do with reducing abortion and everything to do with fundraising and Republicans winning elections.

It’s refreshing to read pro-life leaders finally (albeit temporarily) telling the truth.

The most appalling quote comes from the vice president of Focus on the Family, Tom Minnery, arguing in favor of the PBA ban. It’s nothing we didn’t already suspect, but it’s amazing that Minnery was careless enough to say it in pubilc:

“The old procedure, which is still legal, involves using forceps to pull the baby apart in utero, which means there is greater legal liability and danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus. So we firmly believe there will be fewer later-term abortions as a result of this ruling.”

For years pro-lifers have been pushing the same lie: they’ve claimed¹ that a procedure that involves inserting forceps into a woman’s uterus as many as a dozen times over (a standard D&E) has no greater chance of causing injury than a procedure which requires only a single insertion (a D&X, which is more-or-less the procedure that’s been banned by the Partial Birth Abortion ban).²

Now Focus on the Family’s man in charge of policy not only admits that was a lie, but suggests that increased risk to women is a benefit: the “greater danger of internal bleeding from a perforated uterus” is good, because it might discourage some “later-term”³ abortions.

As Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes:

As you can see, most anti-choicers (despite the bad faith Congressional findings that 2+2=171) don’t really think that these bans on a safer procedure protect women’s physical health. They simply believe that women can’t be trusted to make judgments about their own lives, and if this causes some women to be seriously injured that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s almost impossible to overstate how disgusting this legislation is, and how deeply entwined outright misogyny is with the American “pro-life” movement.

Although Minnery is correct to say that the ban he and his movement favor puts women in danger, I doubt there will be any less abortion as a result. Chuck Donovan of the pro-life Family Research Council is probably right when he says “there may not be even one fewer abortion in the country as a result” of the PBA ban — but note that he’s only admitting that now that the PBA ban has been made law. For years, contrary to what Donovan now admits, pro-life leaders have been claiming — ridiculously — that the partial-birth abortion ban would save little baby lives (all the better to pry open the wallets of the pro-life rank and file). And the vast majority of pro-lifers in this country, who are either totally amoral about lying or complete dupes of their leadership, have been content to let them get away with it.

Now some in the pro-life movement — although no one as major league as Focus On The Family or the Family Research Council — are complaining about the constant lying about this issue by pro-lifer leaders. From “An Open Letter To James Dobson”:

Dr. Dobson, you mislead Christians claiming this ruling will “protect children.” The court granted no authority to save the life of even a single child…. Your correspond­ence depart­ment… told us that with this PBA ruling, “The U.S. Supreme Court made it illegal for women to have an abortion in the last trimester.” Online at KGOV.com, we also document other pro-life media outlets misrep­resenting this vicious ruling. Following your example, many national ministries have spent years using the PBA ban to motivate financial donations, all the while misrepre­senting the legal effect of the ban. Today millions of Christians, including your own staff, have been deceived. …The court explicitly stated the PBA ban “does not on its face impose a substantial obstacle” to “late-term” abortion (p. 26). And since this ban cannot prevent a single abortion, of course, it imposes no obstacle, and neither does it “protect children” (your words) or ban “abortion in the last trimester” (words offered by some of your staff).

More pro-life dissidents, quoted in the Washington Post article:

Rev. Bob Enyart, a Christian talk radio host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, said the real issue is fundraising. “Over the past seven years, the partial-birth abortion ban as a fundraising technique has brought in over a quarter of a billion dollars” for major antiabortion groups, “but the ban has no authority to prevent a single abortion, and pro-life donors were never told that,” he said. “That’s why we call it the pro-life industry.”

In Rohrbough’s view, partisan politics is also involved. “What happened in the abortion world is that groups like National Right to Life, they’re really a wing of the Republican Party, and they’re not geared to push for personhood for an unborn child — they’re geared to getting Republicans elected,” he said. “So we’re seeing these ridiculous laws like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban put forward, and then we’re deceived about what they really do.”

But despite this deep split within the pro-life movement, rest assured that there are some things that they all have in common. For instance, the way that virtually all of these pro-life spokespeople are men. For another, the way that none of them ever express the slightest concern for women’s health or well-being. So you see, they agree on the fundamentals.

More blogging on this story: Our Bodies Our Selves, Feministing, Balkinization,A Foolish Consistency, Dizzy Dayz, Political Animal, and Ryoga. And the aforementioned Mahablog and Lawyers, Guns and Money. And (edited to add) The Debate Link, The Thinkery, Fattmixx, Bligbi, RH Reality Check, Pseudo-Adrienne, The Carpetbagger Report, Obsidian Wings, and Pandagon.

1. See, for example, the text of the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban, which explicitly claims “partial birth” abortions are never safer. (back)
2. This article, via Mahablog, describes other ways doctors are experimenting with possibly less safe procedures in order to avoid breaking the new law. (back)
3. In fact, as Mahablog points out, most uses of the now-banned D&X procedure take place pre-viability, and would be more accurately described as “mid-term” than “late-term” abortions. (back)

I’d like to comment on this recent cartoon from the webcomic xkcd.

This cartoon was brought up on a message board that I read and participate in, at the end of a long conversation about politics (although the point of the message board is non-political, the board does deal with politics sometimes). The conversation was about “tolerance,” and I voiced my opinion that I’m very suspicious when people bring up the topic of “tolerance” as an abstract, because in my experience, people who are talking about tolerance in that context often want to coopt the language of civil rights in order to draw false equivalence between non-equivalent statements. “I support rights for gay people” and “gay people are immoral” are not equivalent statements.

While I like and respect the two people who posted this cartoon, the effect* of introducing the cartoon into the conversation is to minimize anyone who is passionate about politics by saying that their opinions are based not on clear thinking, or passion, or reaction to oppression, but on “rationalization.”

There is a legitimate point being made in this cartoon, as any teacher well knows. Teaching in front of a classroom is a tricky business. It’s difficult to be endowed with so much trust, and I appreciate that people struggle with that.

Outside of math, there are rarely objective and concrete facts that can be pointed to with absolute certainty, by anyone, from any place. 2 + 2 = 4 is not, or at least should not be, a controversial statement.

But the simple fact that someone can argue with me when I say “I support gay rights” is not an indication that I am simply “rationalizing” my position. To suggest it is so is to dismiss the concerns and oppression of gay people.

To say that caring about and debating politics is all about “smart people rationalizing” is the epitome of a priveleged statement. People who are fighting for their rights and survival do not have the privelege to say “oh, well, it all doesn’t really matter” or “I guess this is just a difference of opinion.”

In this country, black women have been sterilized for the color of their skin. I strongly doubt that my interlocutors in that discussion would have agreed that it was acceptable behavior. For me to argue against it — for black women to argue against it — would they call this an exercise in rationalization? I certainly hope not.

People suffer. Queer people suffer. Women suffer. Poor people suffer. People of color suffer. Our suffering is not a cheap political point, to be argued away by saying that our justifiable anger is merely an example of “smart people rationalizing.”

But I don’t really want to pick on the people who posted this cartoon. They’re nice; they’re smart; and I don’t think either one of them intended to offend me. On a personal level, I’m not upset with them. But politically, I want to address the message behind that maneuver, and behind this cartoon, because it’s larger than a single exchange in a debate.
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I went to see Rosita in theHuman Rights Film Festival this weekend.

Rosita’s parents were from Nicaragua, but they moved to Costa Rica to find work. Her father worked as a itinerant coffee picker, her mother sometimes joined him in the fields. Rosita didn’t start school until she was seven, because the school was a long way away. When she was 8 a man, who lived on her way to school, occasionally offered her and her cousins fruit while they were walking past. One day, when she was walking home alone, he raped her.

Rosita’s mother realised something was wrong and took her to the doctor’s several times. Eventually the doctors told Rosita’s mother that Rosita was pregnant.

The documentary Rosita is her story.

Rosita is a very well-made documentary. Despite the fact that Rosita is not shown on film (her parents’ decisions - their reasons are obvious) the film-makers work hard to let her voice come through. The story is told from an oral history Rosita did with her mother, and illustrated with Rosita’s drawings, which are sometimes beautifully animated.

The story would have been worthless if they hadn’t worked to give Rosita a voice, because her story is one of people trying to take away her voice, her choices, and her right to self-determination.

By setting her story in its full context, by showing us the cotton plantations that her parents worked in and the effect this had on her, the film-makers show how connected our struggles for self-determination are. That freedom from sexual violence, and control of reproduction alone would not be enough for girls like Rosita.

The centre of the story is her family’s struggle to get an abortion in either Nicaragua or Costa Rica, even though she was just nine years old. The rapist fades out of the film when he is sentenced to 3 months jail - demonstrating the effect of the rape on her life is so much greater than the effect on his.

There were doctors, Bishops, even government departments, who were trying to stop Rosita from having an abortion. The family had to leave Costa Rica in the middle of the night, because they were worried they would be stopped from leaving. Then they had to run out of the hospital to avoid government officials who were trying to remove her from her parents custody. Usually a Nicaraguan abortion requires authorisation from 3 doctors, in this case the Health department wanted it signed off by a committee of 16.

The attitudes of these various men (and a couple of women) were summed up by one man who said: “I said all along that it would have been better if she had died that day.”

That’s what we’re fighting - so many of our struggles are against people, and power structures, that would rather see us dead than living our lives the way we want to.

The film had a happy ending, as much as it could have. Rosita got an abortion; her parents got some land and moved to the country. But as well as this happy ending it also offered some more hope. It ended with a conversation between the film-makers and a taxi-driver who was saying “I don’t believe they should have had the abortion, abortion was wrong.” The film-makers asked: “What if it was your daughter?” And the taxi-driver couldn’t answer - because the right of someone you love to decide their life (and live their life - pregnancy at 9 carries huge risks) is much harder to deny. I think that compassion and that love is where we can build and organise.

There are lots of things I don’t understand about this world, many of which are the number of intelligent, awesome, analytical feminists who support the Democrats. From Katha Pollit:

So now you know. It really does matter who’s President and which party controls Congress. A Democratic-controlled Congress would never have passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, which banned intact dilation and extraction abortions and, in flagrant violation of Roe v. Wade, lacked an exception to preserve the health of the woman. A Democratic President would never have signed such a bill. Nor would he have nominated the extremely conservative antichoicers John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, which on April 18 upheld, in Gonzales v. Carhart by a 5-to-4 vote (Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas–all GOP nominees), a ban essentially identical to one rejected 5 to 4 in Stenberg v. Carhart seven years ago, when Sandra Day O’Connor was on the bench.

A Democratic president may have never signed this particular bill, but that doesn’t make them staunch upholders of abortion rights. Poor women’s right to abortion were extinguished with the 1976 Hyde Amendment. The Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, when the Hyde Amendment was passed. Then Democratic Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter indicated that he would support the amendment, and this support was one of the reasons Ford backed-down on his threat to veto the legislation. In 1980 the supreme court ruled on the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment; at this time there were two justices who had been appointed by Democratic presidents. If both of those justices had supported poor women’s rights to abortion then the Hyde Amendment would have been ruled unconstitutional, but they did not.

I am not meaning to downplay the seriousness of the latest decision when I say that the effect it will have on women’s lives is extremely limited, when compared to the effect of the Hyde Amendment. The most serious attack on American women’s right to an abortion was a bipartisan effort, and the Democrats more than played their part.

Updated Since writing this post I have learned that the Hyde Amendment (which needs to be authorised every year, so has been supported by every democratic controlled house and senate, and every democratic president since 1977) was debated in 1994. At this stage the democratic controlled house and senate upheld the ban. They added rape and incest exceptions (the original amendment already had a life of the mother clause), but did not add a health of the mother exception. The Democrats support of the Hyde Amendment is not history.

From a CNN story on the Supreme Court’s upholding of the “Partial Birth” abortion ban:

“A lot of us wish that Alito weren’t there and O’Connor were there,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who opposed Alito’s nomination, said.

Harry Reid was one of 17 Democrats who voted in favor of the Federal “partial birth” abortion ban becoming law (without those 17 democrats, the bill wouldn’t have passed). If Reid thinks that the Court should have found the Federal PBA ban unconstitutional, then WHY DID HE VOTE FOR IT???? As Johnathan Adler writes, “Call me old fashioned, but I believe that if a member of the Senate believes a law is unconstitutional, he or she should vote against it.”

And why didn’t CNN point out Reid’s hypocrisy?

I haven’t had much energy to read about the latest disaster from the US supreme court. Back there I used the word ‘disaster’ which is about the extent of my analysis (although it does cover lots of issues quite well).*

But I was reading Phantom Scribbler’s excellent post What the Mommy Bloggers Know

If you’re mainstream media or one of the major political blogs, and you’ve just put together some sort of roundup of the blogs’ discussion of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, we, the legions of irrelevant mommy bloggers, would like to let you know that we have found it lacking. What, you say? Surely everyone knows that mommy bloggers are only good for talking about naps, dirty diapers, and Linda Hirshman. Far be it from me to assert otherwise. But on the other hand, the mommy bloggers all know that the blogger whose voice is really essential to this discussion is Cecily.

Cecily writes at and I wasted all that birth control, and her post on the supreme court decision should be required reading:

Personally, I do not know which procedure I had. At 22.5 weeks gestation (when my pregnancy ended–and that is based on my last menstrual period, remember, not the date of implantation, so the fetuses were really 20.5 week along) I was right on the line between trimesters. Plus the fact that there where two fetus (one barely alive, and one dead) could have impacted which surgery I had.

Other than having a medical termination, the options open to someone in my position are usually either a) emergency c-section, and b) induced delivery.

My doctor believed–given my particular circumstances–that it would be better for both my short term and long term health to not cut open my body if at all possible. My health was in a precarious state, and the option of a medical termination was the fastest, safest, and least complicated procedure to use. It also preserved the health of my uterus for future pregnancies.

I’m not a parent, but I read some ‘Mommy blogs’ written by feminists, because they have some of the best feminist analysis on the web.

This post contains about 20 links to feminist analysis of the Supreme Court’s opinion approving a ban on so-called “Partial Birth” abortions.

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In the clunkiest passage of his Gonzales decision, Justice Kennedy claims that banning late-term abortion is justified because he cares about women sooooo much:

Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. The Act recognizes this reality as well. Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.

In a decision so fraught with emotional consequence some doctors may prefer not to disclose precise details of the means that will be used, confining themselves to the required statement of risks the procedure entails. From one standpoint this ought not to be surprising. Any number of patients facing imminent surgical procedures would prefer not to hear all details, lest the usual anxiety preceding invasive medical procedures become the more intense. This is likely the case with the abortion procedures here in issue. […]

It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.

It is a reasonable inference that a necessary effect of the regulation and the knowledge it conveys will be to encourage some women to carry the infant to full term, thus reducing the absolute number of late-term abortions.

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