Gonzales vs. Carhart, today’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Federal “Partial Birth” abortion (PBA) ban,¹ is a terrible decision for freedom and for women in many ways. But the most destructive element of the Court’s decision is a relatively obscure argument buried deep in Kennedy’s decision.

From Kennedy’s decision:

This is the proper manner to protect the health of the woman if it can be shown that in discrete and well-defined instances a particular condition has or is likely to occur in which the procedure prohibited by the Act must be used. In an as-applied challenge the nature of the medical risk can be better quantified and balanced than in a facial attack. […]

As the previous sections of this opinion explain, respondents have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases. Casey, supra, at 895 (opinion of the Court). We note that the statute here applies to all instances in which the doctor proposes to use the prohibited procedure, not merely those in which the woman suffers from medical complications. It is neither our obligation nor within our traditional institutional role to resolve questions of constitutionality with respect to each potential situation that might develop.

What Kennedy is saying here is that if pro-lifers pass an abortion ban without any health exception, then women can successfully sue to have the ban overturned only in “as applied” cases. So a ban might not be illegal generally, but it still might be illegal in the case of Betty Smith of Memphis, who might be able to convince a court the ban “as applied” to women with her specific health circumstances is unconstitutional because it threatens her health.

But even if one lawsuit is successful in overturning the law “as applied” to the particular person who sued, the law could still apply to other women in other circumstances - meaning all those women would have to sue individually if they think the law is unconstitutionally being applied to them. The net effect could be to make it much harder for pro-choice activists to get Courts to consider whether or not new abortion-related laws are Constitutional.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Here is an AP article reporting the Gonzales decision, and here is the text of the decision itself. (back)

This is my shameless attempt to get some help brainstorming an essay. If this is out of line, Amp, feel free to take the post down.

Two years ago - and it’s scary how the time has slipped past - I was in the very early stages of pregnancy, and I never seemed to have any energy left. By afternoon, I was often so exhausted I just took to my bed and slept for several hours. When I told my then-boyfriend, he called me lazy.

“Yeah?” I said. “When you can turn fish fingers into people, come back and we’ll talk.”

Any thoughts?

Young Woman (YW): Excuse me? I’m making a baby area, but I forget to make a sign before I left my house.

Amp: You want me to make you a sign? Sure.¹

YW: Thanks! It should say “Mothers Room” in big letters. We’re going to make the parlor room a quiet area for feeding babies.

Amp: Okay.

YW: And below that, in smaller letters, can you put “for mothers and their young children?”

Amp: No problem. But what happens if a father wants to bottle-feed his baby?²

YW: Well, we don’t want to get too PC here.

Amp: You’re already setting up a nursing room, which is pretty PC of you.

YW: Nonono, it’s a “mother’s room.” A lot of people weren’t sure it’s all right to have nursing in church, so we’re calling it a mother’s room.

Amp: Oh.

To be fair, there are plenty of people in the church group who are very hip and liberal and play acoustic guitar and (if male) wear stylish stubble. But sometimes the culture shock still takes me by surprise…

1. This is a common request at my job, so I have a bunch of sign formats saved on the office computer. (back)
2. In retrospect, this was a stupid question; given how conservative these folks are, of course they don’t want any men in an area where mothers are breastfeeding. This didn’t occur to me at the time, probably because none of the nursing moms I’ve hung out with hesitated to nurse their babies in a mixed crowd. (back)

Via F-Words and Eye on Boise, I learned that Idaho State Representative Bob Nonini has proposed a law “to outlaw the use of threats or physical force to dissuade a pregnant woman from giving birth.”

I emailed Representative Nonini, and we had this exchange:

ME: My question is, do you also feel that those who coerce women into not having abortions should be penalized?

NONINI: No, I do not believe that coercing a woman into not having an abortion should be penalized.

Kudos to Nonini for honesty; most politicians would have dodged the question.

Nonini isn’t alone in feeling that pro-life coercion is acceptable. In August, I blogged about Michigan’s “Coercive Abortion Prevention Act.”¹ As I wrote then, the law itself seems benign, at least on the surface. What makes it twisted, is that the Michigan pro-lifers who pushed CAPA through the legislature, actively worked to defeat an amendment to this law, which would have left CAPA intact but also have applied the same rules and penalties to people who coerce women not to have an abortion. In other words, in both Idaho and Michigan, pro-lifers explicitly opposed making it illegal to use threats or physical force coerce a woman into giving birth.²

It’s not really being against coercion if you only oppose it when you don’t like its results.

Of course, pro-lifers are pro-coercion; being pro-life by definition means wanting the state to coerce unwilling pregnant women to give birth. But I think there’s another reason pro-life politicians won’t support real anti-coercion legislation: They want to protect anti-abortion activists. In particular, I think they didn’t want to make it possible for women to sue so-called Crisis Pregnancy Centers for using fright and intimidation to compel women not to have abortions.

Pro-choice groups in more liberal states should propose “Coercion Prevention Acts” of their own — acts which would make it illegal for women to be “terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, or harassed” to compel her to make any reproductive decision (not just about abortion or not-abortion, but also sterilization and not-sterilization). Unlike the pro-lifers, we genuinely don’t favor coercion — so we can make the laws fair and even-handed, prohibiting coercion in either direction. If the laws are passed, then good.

And when “pro-life” leaders oppose such laws - as I’m sure they would - then at least they’d be a bit further exposed as hypocrites. Plus, their vote against outlawing coercion would be a lodestone around their necks when it came time for reelection.

1. I’ve recycled some of the prose from that post in this post. (back)
2. You might object, “aren’t these things already illegal?” But it’s hard for lawmakers who are themselves proposing an anti-coercion law to credibly make use of the “aren’t these things already illegal” defense. (back)

Right-wingers are attacking Democrats for scuttling “the Ryan White Early Diagnosis Grant Program,” or as they often call it, the “baby AIDS” bill. Why are liberals against helping babies with AIDS, they cry? Isn’t helping AIDS babies something we can all agree on? (See these links, for example: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8). This outpouring of “baby AIDS” related anger is being led by the Family Research Council’s Joe Carter, who sent a mass email-mail that virtually all the above-linked bloggers are cribbing from.

Of course, none of this is as simple as conservatives claim.

In fact, the bill Carter is so angry about is almost entirely irrelevant to HIV prevention; the mandatory newborn testing Carter favors is useless for telling us if newborns are HIV positive, is overly controlling of mothers, and will do almost nothing for preventing HIV transmission; and virtually all the effective policies for reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission involve improving the effectiveness and availability of prenatal care.

1) The omnibus bill Carter is angry about has almost nothing to do with HIV prevention.

The specific legislation that set Joe Carter and the FRC off is an omnibus legislation intended to eliminate dozens of so-called “earmark” programs. In order to prevent the anti-earmark bill from having dozens of anti-anti-earmarks hanging off of it, the Democrats decided to accept no amendments at all, on any subject, to the anti-earmark bill. The no-amendments provision doesn’t seem like an unreasonable approach to an anti-earmark bill, and it certainly has nothing to do with the Democrats being against AIDS prevention funding.

(For further discussion of this aspect, read Kevin Keith’s arguments in the comments of Evangelical Outpost.¹ )

2) Mandatory newborn testing can’t tell us if newborns have HIV. It can only tell us if mothers have HIV.

It’s important to understand that HIV-testing a newborn doesn’t tell us if the newborn is HIV positive. For the first 18 months of life, infants who aren’t infected with HIV will nonetheless test as HIV-positive if their mother was HIV positive while she was pregnant. (This happens because anti-HIV antibodies, which is what the standard test looks for, are transmitted from mother to child in the womb. Source.). 75% to 85% of infants who “test positive” for HIV do not have HIV.

There is a newer test which tests for HIV virus in the baby, rather than just testing for antibodies. However, this test is only 33% accurate on a newborn; it’s not until a baby is two months old that this test becomes 90% accurate, and not until six months that it’s 95% accurate. (Source).

So there’s no effective way of finding out if a newborn baby has HIV. What testing the babies actually provides is a way of finding out if the mother has HIV. “Newborn” testing avoids the sometimes uncomfortable and slow work of getting a mother’s informed consent for HIV testing — by testing for the mother’s HIV status indirectly. It’s about avoiding the need for the mother’s consent. As Senator Tom Coburn, the leading proponent of mandatory newborn testing, say: “If they didn’t want to be tested, their baby was tested.”

Labor, childbirth and the hours immediately after birth is the time when a mother has the least choice about being in the hospital, and about submitting herself and her baby to medical tests; it is therefore the time that conservatives have been most eager to test women for drugs and for HIV. With a mandatory newborn testing law, there’s no need to muck about with counseling and informed consent and all that; you just do the test, wam bam no need for thanking you ma’am.

3) Mandatory newborn testing is mostly worthless for preventing HIV transmission.

The FRC’s Joe Carter asks “what could possibly be more important than preventing babies form contracting HIV/AIDS?” But the only controversial part of the Ryan White Early Diagnosis Grant Program is mandatory newborn testing — and mandatory newborn testing is mostly worthless for preventing mother to child transmission.

Consider this real-life story from The Body, an advocacy group for people with HIV and AIDS. Rosa, a 27-year-old mother, lives in New York. (New York’s mandatory newborn testing program is often cited by advocates as a success story). When Rosa found out she was pregnant with her second child, she went for prenatal care and counseling, and was counseled about the importance of breastfeeding. But at no point was she counseled about HIV or advised to get tested. Six weeks after giving birth to her daughter, the hospital called Rosa.

A phone call summoned her to the mental health division of the hospital. There, during a meeting that lasted less than fifteen minutes, she learned that her daughter had been tested under New York State’s mandatory newborn HIV testing program and that her results were positive.

No one had informed Rosa ahead of time that her daughter would be tested. No one informed Rosa now what the results of the test meant. It was only later, through her own research efforts, that Rosa learned that the temporary presence of the mother’s viral antibodies in a newborn’s blood means that all infants of HIV-positive women will test HIV-positive at birth. It was only later that she learned that only 15 to 25 percent of these newborns will themselves be infected by the virus. It was only later that she learned that screening newborns for HIV antibodies reveals the HIV status of the mother, not that of the infant.

Rosa immediately told her boyfriend about the test results. A few weeks later, however, a visiting nurse who came to the apartment when Rosa was not at home implied to the boyfriend that Rosa had known her status before her daughter’s birth but hadn’t told him. When Rosa got home, her boyfriend beat her up, forcing her and her children to leave her apartment and stay in a shelter for several days.

“I definitely would have tested prenatally if anyone had asked,” says Rosa. “If I had known earlier, I would have planned. I probably would have taken AZT because I would have wanted to increase the chances that my child would not have the virus. I would never have breastfed.”

Does anyone believe that New York’s mandatory testing program did a good job of reducing Rosa’s odds of transmitting HIV to her daughter?

By definition, testing newborns happens too late to prevent most mother to child transmissions. Serious efforts to prevent mother to child HIV transmission have to be prenatal, before the virus is transmitted. And that requires working with mothers, not bulldozing over them. The good news is, prenatal testing and treatment have already been successful at vastly reducing mother to child HIV transmission nationwide. So why do we want to take $30 million dollars away from existing programs (which are already critically underfunded) and give it instead to programs that include mandatory newborn testing — a “prevention” effort that’s guaranteed not to be very effective?

Supporters of mandatory newborn testing often claim that such programs have worked miracles preventing HIV transmission, usually citing New York as an example. But there have been enormous improvements nationwide, not just in New York and other states with mandatory newborn testing. According to a CDC factsheet on mother-to-child HIV transmission, “Over the course of the epidemic, the number of perinatally transmitted AIDS cases has decreased dramatically. The number of infants infected with HIV through mother-to-child transmission decreased from an estimated peak of 1,750 HIV-infected infants born each year during the early to mid-1990s to 280–370 infants in 2000 (CDC, unpublished data, 2000). This decrease is largely due to the use of antiretroviral therapy during pregnancy and labor.” (Emphasis added).

4) What we should be fighting for.

• Prenatal care for all pregnant women.
• Information and counseling on prenatal HIV testing for all pregnant women, and on pregnancy, childrearing and HIV for HIV positive pregnant women. These should be available in a variety of languages and designed for a variety of cultural backgrounds.
• Free anti-HIV drugs for all HIV positive pregnant women (and all HIV positive people, but that’s a topic for a different post, I suppose). Being treated for HIV drastically reduces the chances of a mother transmitting HIV to a child in the womb or during childbirth - from around 20% to less than 2%. (For those who are interested, here (pdf link) is a detailed discussion of the medical issues.)
• Attention to the economic and other issues that often prevents women, especially non-white, immigrant, or low-income women, from getting adequate prenatal care. This is too large a topic for this post, but issues to be considered include low-cost transportation, language and cultural barriers, how difficult it is to get prenatal care outside of regular working hours, childcare for mothers expecting new children, and the impact of abuse. This may sound like a grab-bag of irrelevant issues, but in fact it’s a central issue: Readily available prenatal care is the number one way we can prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission.
• A model of medical care that assumes that all women — including women with HIV — need to give informed consent for all medical treatment and tests.

Sources/ Further reading:

HIV Infection in Infants and Children
Whose Virus Is It Anyway?, from The Body
Routine Testing Must Include Informed Consent
Mother-To-Child (Perinatal) HIV Transmission And Prevention (CDC factsheet)
Striking A Balance: HIV Testing For Pregnant Women And Newborns

1. From one of Kevin’s comments:

   HJRes20 is the omnibus “anti-earmark” bill. As many people have noted, getting rid of “earmarks” is harder than it looks, because there is no legal distinction between an “earmark” for “pork-barrel spending” and an ordinary appropriation for an ordinary program. But both parties have declared they are going to do something about “earmarks”.

   The approach they have taken is to submit a huge bill that comprehensively strikes out hundreds - possibly thousands, there were too many for me to count - of targeted allocations for named programs. The same bill stipulates specific levels of funding for different departments, and in some cases specifies that that funding should be used in certain ways.

   …The bill is an attempt to clear the decks of the thousands of small allocations for individual projects, in order to start a systematic attempt to decide what should or should not be funded. Along the way, a huge number of specific funding initiatives - most of them probably reasonable - have been undone. (Note that this does not mean that these programs will not get funded, or that the money will “just sit there”. It means that all those funding decisions will have to be revisited, hopefully with greater oversight. Every single one of the rescinded “earmarks” could be funded if Congress chooses to do so, even after passing this bill.)

   So what’s up with the Baby AIDS program? It is one of the hundreds of line items that is being taken out of the budget.

   Why are the Democrats holding it up? They’re not. A Republican member attempted to re-insert a specific earmark for that program in the bill designed to eliminate earmarks. Reid has said he will not allow specific programs to be exempted. I don’t think Reid has said anything about the Baby AIDS program - just that he wants the entire earmark bill dealt with at once, and not a bunch of earmarks on the earmark bill.

   (back)

From the Lactivist blog:

I want to make it clear to my readers that based off of our contact with the staff at the National Pork Board it is quite clear to me that they were extremely upset that anyone would feel they were not supportive of nursing mothers. The fact that the staff has dug into their own pockets in order to make a contribution strikes me as extremely generous and I think that they should be applauded for their response to this issue.

Now, this is where YOU come in once again.

It’s quite clear that bad news travels fast. The question is, will good news travel as well?

We all know how rare it is these days for a big corporation to admit that they’re wrong. Rarer yet, is the group of executives that are willing to dig into their own pockets to make a donation to right a wrong. (So much easier to dip into the corporate coffers and to write it off as a business expense.) If we’re going to lambaste the companies that behave poorly, we must celebrate the companies that do the right thing.

So my request is this… Help me spread the word about a company that not only admitted their mistake, but that quickly worked to come together in an act of good will that will benefit the countless babies and families that benefit from the work of the Mother’s Milk Bank of Ohio. Take a moment and write a letter of thanks to the same email addresses that you fired off your letter of fury to. Take a simple moment to say “thanks.”

This is one of those stories I could not make up. Here’s a quote from the Lactivist:

Yep, you read that right. The Lactivist is being threatened with a lawsuit.

Why? Because I was selling a shirt that said “the other white milk.”

First, a little background if you’re new to the site. The Lactivist is a blog about breastfeeding and human milk banking. It’s mostly a gathering place for breastfeeding moms to come and share their thoughts and experiences and to keep up to date on the latest issues in the fight for the rights of a child to eat in public. To help fund the site (and to raise money for the non-profit milk banks) I have a CafePress store that sells t-shirts with funny pro-breastfeeding slogans. Things like “Milk on Tap” and “That’s my baby’s lunch you’re staring at.”

Thus…the shirt that read “the other white milk.”

I received a letter this morning from Jennifer Daniel Collins, an attorney at Faegre & Benson that represents The National Pork Board. It stated, for the most part, that my use of the phrase “the other white milk” violates their trademark on the phrase “the other white meat.” As such, they’ve demanded that I remove the shirt, demanded that the image of the shirt be removed from any site I know of, demanded that I destroy any shirts that exist with the logo and demand that I not at any point in the future use the phrase in a commercially profitable way.

This makes me want to give up bacon and ham, and pork is damn near my favorite meat.

Please read the entire post, and the subsequent post, which seems a little more optimistic. The Lactivist is getting an apology, but they are still trying to “work through the issues.” Go over and show your support!! This is one of the most ridiculous threatened lawsuits I’ve ever heard about.

Thanks to The Anti-essentialist Conundrum for the heads up.

Brownfemipower has a really interesting post about the governer of Texas’s decision to make the HPV vaccine compulsory for all girls sixth grade or above. This would also make the vaccine available for free for those who were uninsured or whose insurance doesn’t cover the vaccine:

I’m really conflicted about the news that the governor of texas just wrote into law the requirement that all girls get vaccinated for HPV virus (the same one that causes cancer).

Unlike a lot of Texans who oppose the shot, I don’t for a minute think that this shot is going to cause girls to run out and screw anything that moves. But as a parent who has had to make the decision to vaccinate my child (or refuse to, depending) for anything from ear infections to polio–I’m really wondering if this governor is writing this requirement into law because he’s some big lover of women (as a lot of the leftist blogosphere seems to be thinking), or if he’s just gotten himself some pretty pocket money from the drug companies who make this vaccination (according to the article, at least 6000$ in campaign donations).

In New Zealand there is an immunisation schedule, and immunisations on the schedule are free (see we still have some tatters of a socialised medicine system left). However, there is no requirement for parents to get their child immunised, either before starting school, or at any other time. I am a strong supporter of the HPV vaccine going on the immunisation schedule, because I believe all women have the right to protect themselves from cancer. But here, we don’t have to make any trade-offs.

As I understand it the only way a vaccine can be available to all, and publicly funded in America is if it is compulsory before a child can attend school (there are exemptions available to parents for conscience reasons). I can understand the public health argument which says that a kid must be immunised from certain infectious diseases before they start school (I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I understand it), disease can travel very quickly among unorganised children at school and this can cause an epidemic. But this logic does not apply to the HPV vaccine, HPV is a lot harder to contract than measles, so it isn’t going to spread round a school in the same way (it is clear that the vaccine is as important for later in life as it is for 6th grade, unlike other vaccines) and any genuine worry about the disease spreading would require both boys and girls to be immunised. There appears to be two reasons to support compulsory vaccination, either because your in the pay of the drug company, or you believe that it’s important that poor women get access to the vaccine (or both). Neither of these are based on genuine health concerns, which would be solved by making the vaccine compulsory.

This puts feminists in an impossible position. I’ll leave it for American feminists to discuss how they deal with this problem; I’ll just be glad that I don’t have to choose between access and choice.

Blog for Choice day has come and gone, and there’s a lot of great posts. I’m very excited that a lot of feminists have taken this opportunity to interogate and question the usefulnes of ‘choice’ as a slogan, goal, or analysis. I have lots of ideas about this, and hopefully I’ll get round to writing about some of them soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to write about one tiny corner of those issues.

When abortion battles were fought and won (or lost, in New Zealand’s case - but we won the wore), they weren’t fought using the term ‘pro-choice’.

The feminist slogan was: “A woman’s right to choose.”

The most obvious thing we’ve lost in the compacting of the slogan to a label is the woman. The feminist slogan put women at the centre of our argument.

The term pro-choice, also steps back from demanding our rights, and phrasing those rights as anything which interferes with making the choices we wish to make. I believe that charging women fees for abortion interferes with her right to choose, just as surely as making her get her abortion signed off by two doctors.

The phrase pro-choice is too wishy-washy, too vague, and too open to the idea that it’s the ability to choose that matters, rather than the quality of the options. The choice between continuing and unwanted pregnancy or working as a prostitute to pay for an abortion is a choice some women have to make, in places where abortion isn’t funded by the state. That doesn’t mean I’m for that choice. Other women have to have abortions because they can’t afford the time off work that would come with pregnancy. Again I’m not pro-that choice. As a feminist part of what I want is to ensure that women don’t have to spend their lives choosing between two shitty options.* In the meantime I will fight to ensure that women themselves are able to decide which shitty option they think is better, but that’s not my end-goal.

So maybe I’m not pro-choice after-all - I think I’ll ditch the short-hand - waste the extra syllables and make sure I always say that I believe in a woman’s right to choose.

* I’m not saying (and don’t believe) that abortion is always a shitty option, but that it can be, for some women under some circumstances.

Today is the 34th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and also blog for choice day.* The topic is supposed to be ‘why am I pro-choice’. It seems a little trite, I’m pro-choice because I believe women are people, I’m pro-choice because I want to decide when I have a child, I’m pro-choice because I have two younger sisters, I’m pro-choice because I trust other women to make choices about their own lives, I’m pro-choice because sex should be awesome, I’m pro-choice because of all the women who have died and are dying from illegal abortions, I’m pro-choice because of all the women who have died and are dying because they couldn’t get an illegal abortion, I’m pro-choice because parenting is a hard important job and must be voluntary, I’m pro-choice because I know how hard women fought in New Zealand to ensure women would have access to abortion.

It probably says a lot about my life that, for me, those things go without saying. I have met with people who oppose abortion and regarded them as slightly quaint (or hated them passionately depending on the circumstances).** I got over a guy I’d had a crush on for way too long when I discovered he wasn’t pro-choice enough for me.

What I want to say about abortion isn’t anything to do with what I think the laws should be.*** There have been two things I’ve written about frequently on this blog the first that access is as important as rights and that the right to choose has to also include the right to continue the pregnancy.

Brownfemipower has some great posts about the US National Advocates for Pregnant Women conference (which she’s at at the moment). What they really made me think about is how much abortion is normally treated as a stand-alone issue, and how counter-productive that is.

It’s all pretty irrelevant in New Zealand; I’d guess we have more women fighting other reproductive issues (social welfare, medical care, women in prisons, violence against women) than abortion. But if I wanted to change that, if I had the energy to start fighting back then I would try and work with people who didn’t just want to focus on abortion laws (although our abortion laws are a piece of shit and I will not rest till I have danced on the grave of every man who voted for them), but saw that almost all issues that effect women’s lives, effect reproduction. We won’t be able to make meaningful choices until we create a very different world.

*I must confess to finding this a tad annoying - abortion rights don’t begin and end in the US, but you get used to it.

**I once had a half hour argument about abortion on a peace vigil with an ex-nun.

*** Although for the record I’m really hard case about abortion law and don’t accept any legal restrictions for any reason, don’t ever think it’s anyone’s business but the woman whose making the decision, and think that if you don’t like decisions people are making to terminate their pregnancies you should change the conditions under which they make the decision, rather than tut-tut about the decision itself.

I heard about this today on BBC:

In a case fraught with ethical questions, the parents of a severely mentally and physically disabled child have stunted her growth to keep their little “pillow angel” a manageable and more portable size. The bedridden 9-year-old girl had her uterus and breast tissue removed at a Seattle hospital and received large doses of hormones to halt her growth. She is now 4-foot-5; her parents say she would otherwise probably reach a normal 5-foot-6.

The case has captured attention nationwide and abroad via the Internet, with some decrying the parents’ actions as perverse and akin to eugenics. Some ethicists question the parents’ claim that the drastic treatment will benefit their daughter and allow them to continue caring for her at home..

I’m really shocked by this case. I don’t want to be overly critical of parents raising severly disabled kids because I do think there is no good support system in place for them, but I’m shocked that doctors and a medical ethics board were willing to go along with this.

One of the things that really caught my attention was the quotes about breast removal from the blog that the parents have created to explain the surgery:

Ashley has no need for developed breasts since she will not breast feed and their presence would only be a source of discomfort to her. This is especially true since Ashley is likely destined to have large breasts, given her maternal and paternal female lineage; for example, an aunt had a breast reduction operation at age 19. Large breasts are uncomfortable lying down with a bra and even less comfortable without a bra. Furthermore, breasts impede securing Ashley in her wheelchair, stander, or bath chair, where straps across her chest are needed to support her body weight. Before the surgery Ashley had already exhibited sensitivity in her breasts.

And then soon after there is this quote:

Large breasts could “sexualize” Ashley towards her caregiver, especially when they are touched while she is being moved or handled, inviting the possibility of abuse.

I am at a loss for words :-O :-O

I definitely think this is a feminist issue and a disability rights issue. The the desexualization of the disabled combined with the extremely gendered nature of this treatment just astonishes me. To me feminist reproductive rights advocates should be lining up to challenge this treatment (But if I was a betting women, I’d bet most of them won’t say much.).

I went over to Blue’s site to see if she has responded. She said she will put up a comment soon.

What do you think?

From the LA Times:

Hours after the outgoing attorney general of Kansas charged one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers with illegally aborting viable fetuses, a judge dismissed the charges, ruling Friday that the attorney general had overstepped his authority. [….] Kline’s last-minute push to charge Tiller before he leaves office was dismissed on the grounds it violated a 19th century statute outlining the attorney general’s duties.

Kline, who is Operation Rescue’s “Man Of The Year” for 2006, was rejected by the voters at least in part because of his fanatical anti-abortion views. He’s not through making trouble; the article reports that he’s already planning to use his next gig, as a county-level district attorney, to harass a Planned Parenthood office.

Here’s the part of the article I found most interesting:

Last year, Dr. George Tiller reported aborting 240 viable fetuses at his Wichita clinic because the pregnant woman was at risk of irreversible harm.

Anti-abortion activists have long contended that Tiller’s diagnoses are flimsy. Seeking to verify those suspicions, the attorney general pressed a two-year legal battle to get access to Tiller’s medical records. Charts for about 60 patients were turned over to him in late October.

The 30 charges Kline filed against Tiller — all misdemeanors — center on 15 of those patients. According to court records, all were approved for abortions because they suffered anxiety or had experienced an episode of “major depressive disorder.” Among them were several young teens and one 10-year-old, all of them in their late second or early third trimesters.

Kline maintains that depression is not a valid reason for a late-term abortion under Kansas law because the woman’s major bodily functions are not irreversibly threatened. Allies in the anti-abortion community agree: “This is a loophole that Tiller’s trying to exploit,” said Troy Newman, director of Operation Rescue.

But the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that any restrictions on abortion must include an exception for the pregnant woman’s health, including her mental well-being. The Kansas Supreme Court reminded Kline of that precedent last year.

“I believe I have complied with the spirit of the law and with the letter of the law,” Tiller said in an interview in June 2005, one of very few he has given in recent years.

On Friday, Tiller’s lawyers said he is “wholly innocent” and “has operated his practice under a microscope of scrutiny from the public and regulatory authorities.”

Tiller’s clinic — one of just three in the nation that perform late-term abortions — draws patients from as far as California, Vermont, Florida and Puerto Rico. Many have discovered late in their pregnancies that they’re carrying fetuses with genetic abnormalities or fatal deformities. Some are suicidal. A few, Tiller said, fear their relatives will disown, beat or even kill them for conceiving out of wedlock.

“They are absolutely desperate, for whatever reason, to terminate the pregnancy,” Tiller said in the 2005 interview. “I will never know in my heart and soul what that [feels like]. But I think it must mean as much to a woman to be told she can’t have an abortion as it does for a patient with cancer to be told that nothing can be done for him.”

The pro-life movement has committed itself to opposing health exceptions to abortion bans. But Dr. Tiller’s statements reflect a reality that pro-life fanatics ignore: There are real reasons that late-term abortions are needed; the suffering that some individual women will deal with, if pro-life fanatics get their way, will be horrible. Proposing to do away with health exceptions, including mental health exceptions, is proposing that the well-being of women (and girls) is not a relevant concern under the law. A more misogynistic view is hard to imagine.

(Also, that Operation Rescue’s “man of the year” opposes a mental health exception for a pregnant 10 year old vividly illustrates how little concern or compassion the pro-life movement has for post-birth children, doesn’t it?)

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

I’m currently trying to revise and expand Lady Madonna for publication as part of an essay collection, and I just had this thought.

Noting the similarities between me and a classical image of Madonna and Child is harmless enough. Concluding that I’m going to behave like the demure Virgin Mary of classical art is a step too far, and resenting me for acting like myself instead of the image is right out of line. Of course, this problem is only loosely connected to gender dysphoria: female-identified mothers suffer in just the same ways. Take the militant lactivists who confuse matters completely by aggressively demanding their right to breastfeed in public, or the mothers through the ages who protest the sacrifice of their children in needless wars.

Is this part of the reason why breastfeeding in public arouses such hostility in some quarters? If it was that perfect submissive Mary (who was delighted to be informed her destiny was to be a vessel, rather than wanting an abortion like these uppity women), she would naturally go elsewhere as soon as she realised she was making someone else uncomfortable. How dare these uppity women go around looking like the Virgin Mary and then refuse to behave like her?

Any thoughts?

From Reverand Debra at Sexuality And Religion:

Yesterday, I blogged about the Catholic Bishops telling their married congregants not to use birth control.

Seems like the nation’s family planning program could be headed in that direction as well. The Bush administration yesterday announced its appointment of Dr. Erik Keroack as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, the nation’s official in charge of the national family planning program.
Here’s part of the press release we put out:

“It is a cruel joke on low-income women in America who turn to the government for assistance with family planning services to place Dr. Erik Keroack in charge of the national Title X program.

Dr. Keroack is an anti-contraception advocate who has been serving as medical director of “A Women’s Concern,” an organization with an official policy that states “birth control…is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and averse to human health and happiness.”

This appointment doesn’t require an approval from Congress.

In the Washington Post, Cecile Richards (the president of Planned Parenthood) was quoted saying “The appointment of anti-birth control, anti-sex education advocate Dr. Eric Keroack to oversee the nation’s family planning program is striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation’s priorities.”

The boobs at Delta, that is.¹

See that photo, to the right? That’s Emily Gillette breastfeeding her child (as you can see, she’s virtually dancing topless!). And that sight is apparently sooo offensive that it can’t be allowed on planes. From the Burlington Free Press:

Gillette said she was seated in the second-to-last row, next to the window, when she began to breast-feed her daughter. Breast-feeding helps babies with the altitude changes through takeoff and landings, Gillette said. She said she was being discreet — her husband was seated between her and the aisle — and no part of her breast was showing.

Gillette said that’s when a flight attendant approached her, trying to hand her a blanket and directing her to cover up. Gillette said she told the attendant she was exercising her legal right to breast-feed, declining the blanket. That’s when Gillette alleges the attendant told her, “You are offending me,” and told her to cover up her daughter’s head with the blanket.

“I declined,” Gillette said in her complaint.

Moments later, a Delta ticket agent approached the Gillettes and said that the flight attendant was having the family removed from the flight.

The airline’s behavior is appalling. To make it even worse, this happened in Vermont, where state law says that mothers have the right to breastfeed in public (Queenbadmama has the text of Vermont’s law).

Lactivists haven’t been taking this lying down - they’ve staged a nurse-in, a turn of events Emily Gillette was apparently surprised but pleased by.

MomsRising.org has a petition you can sign, “to tell Delta Airlines to get a clue and be supportive of breastfeeding mothers. And tell Congress it’s time to pass the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, which amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding mothers.”

As you’d expect, the Momblogs have been covering this story. More blogging on this topic: Queen of the Bad Mommies (who I adore based on her blog name alone!), Blogher, Playground Revolution, Blogging Baby, Mama Knows Breast, The Zero Boss, Mother Talkers (which has a great header image, by the way), Strange As Angels (who is pissed off!), and Aurelia Ann (whose post is titled “Throw Momma From The Plane”).

Thanks to Bean for pointing out this story to me!

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

1. Freedom Air, actually, but Freedom Air was acting as Delta, or Delta was doing business as Freedom Air, or something. I’ve never quite groked all the little airline intertwining. (back)

Both Newsweek and The Nation have both posted articles about the “Quiverfull” movement - the extremist anti-birth-control movement among right-wing Protestants. (The title of this post is a quote from a leader of the movement, quoted in the Newsweek article). Here are some excerpts from the articles. First, from Newsweek:

Beyond such purists, the anti-birth control message appears to be gaining ground among some evangelicals. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has become one of its most prominent advocates. “If a couple sees children as an imposition, as something to be vaccinated against, like an illness, that betrays a deeply erroneous understanding of marriage and children,” says Mohler. “Children should be seen as good by default.” His stance isn’t as extreme as that of quiverfull followers; for instance, he condones the use of condoms for married couples in extreme circumstances, like illness. Still, Mohler’s views are considered “an oddity” in mainstream Baptist circles, according to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land admits, however, that Mohler has certainly expanded his following. “He is seen as the popularizer of a position that is still very marginal, but 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been discussed,” says Land, adding that he knows of at least two former students who had reverse vasectomies after hearing Mohler’s arguments. […]

Stephanie Coontz, director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families, says she has increasingly noticed articles on the subject in the Christian press. Part of the reason, she argues, is that conservatives are reacting to revolutionary changes in women’s social roles and seeking to re-impose a more traditional order. “The rhetoric is getting more shrill because people are getting more desperate,” she says. “It’s a backlash that I don’t feel will triumph. In the past, large families were helpful economically, but today, they become a disadvantage, especially to younger kids who don’t get as many resources.”

Coontz has it right; what’s at issue here isn’t just how many children to have, but the sex roles for men and women. Men on top, ruling the household; women below, raising the kids. Lots and lots and lots of kids. From the Nation article:

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–”Father knows best”–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the “Great Physician” and sole “Birth Controller,” opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies–the Lord’s temple–are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception–adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes–and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Although the Quiverfull movement is an extreme, it’s my impression that an anti-birth-control movement has been rising among American evangelicals. Having sex without women risking pregnancy is seen as abdicating the role women have been assigned by God.

You know what the scariest sentence in the Newsweek article is? “His stance isn’t as extreme as that of quiverfull followers; for instance, he condones the use of condoms for married couples in extreme circumstances, like illness.” Yes, that’s what makes someone a moderate on birth control: Condoms are okay if the mom is too deathly ill to risk pregnancy.

Note also the final page of the Nation article, in which DLC¹ paid researcher Kenneth Longman is quoted recommending that Democrats should bid for these voters by urging a return to patriarchy (and giving up on abortion rights). Unsurprising, but still annoying as hell.

1. DLC stands for Democratic Leadership Council, an extremely influential Democratic Party organ. (back)

I saw this study a few week ago, and at the time I didn’t have much time to write about it. The study has important ramifications for women’s rights and the prevention of sexually transmitted infections.

The general findings indicate that at the national level (not the individual level) westerners have more sex partners and fewer sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This challenges some common myths about HIV in Africa, and it seems to me that this study furthers the case for condom distribution and comprehensive health care. Here is a quote:

“We did have some of our preconceptions dashed,” she said, explaining that they had expected to find the most promiscuous behaviour in regions like Africa, with the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

That was not the case, as multiple partners were more commonly reported in industrialised countries where the incidence of such diseases were relatively low.

“There’s a misperception that there’s a great deal of promiscuity in Africa, which is one of the potential reasons for HIV/AIDS spreading so rapidly,” said Dr Paul van Look, director of Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organisation, who was unconnected to the study. “But that view is not supported by the evidence.”

Professor Wellings said that implied promiscuity may be less important than factors such as poverty and education – especially in the encouragement of condom use – in the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.

The study’s findings don’t bode well for people who advocate marriage as a way to lower STI transmission, and they show a connection between the status of women and the spread of STIs. Specifically they found that gender equality seems to be correlated with fewer STIs.

Researchers also found that married people have the most sex, and that there has been a gradual shift to delay marriage. While that has meant a predictable rise in the rates of premarital sex, experts believe this doesn’t necessarily translate into more dangerous behaviour.

In some instances, married women may be at more risk than single women.

“A single woman is more able to negotiate safe sex in certain circumstances than a married woman,” said Dr van Look, who pointed out that married women in Africa and Asia are often threatened by unfaithful husbands who frequent prostitutes.

There is much greater equality between women and men with regard to the number of sexual partners in rich countries than in poor countries, the study found.

For example, men and women in Australia, Britain, France and the US tend to have an almost equal number of sexual partners.

By contrast, in Cameroon, Haiti and Kenya, men tend to have multiple partners while women tend only to have one.

So my sense is the more sexual freedom for women, the better the economic and education opportunities for everyone, and the better the health education system, the fewer STIs are spread.

Other people’s elections have two important elements that make them better than my own, first my emotional detachment and my intellectual detachment match. In NZ elections I know Labour sucks, and I know it’s not going to matter that much, but I still end up caring, and I find that frustrating. The other thing is that other people have first past the post voting systems, which while fundamentally undemocratic, are really fun to watch.

I think it’s basically the geek in me that likes elections. I suspect the part of me that decided that all X-files episodes that began with the letter ‘P’ were of superior quality (this was back in Season three, I make no claism f), is exactly the same part of me that loves knowing that the thing to do is watch New Hampshire 2.

Of course an election is no fun if you can’t support a team. I find if you look there’s always something to care about: in Britain it was the fate of Plaid Cymru,¹ in America it was the ballot measures, and knowing if the Democrats took back the house no-one will be able to do anything for two years.

According to CNN all states that had minimum wage increases on the ballots succeeded (often with large margins), that’s far more than any New Zealand election has done. Plus the news on the abortion rights front is all good - two parental notification clauses knocked out, and the South Dakota abortion ban overturned. If they can’t ban abortion in South Dakota, then that has to be a good sign.

The rest is less fun (although go Arizona for being the first state not legislate Homophobia), also I’m not sure that I believe CNN, when it says that it’s covering the key ballot initiatives. I read somewhere that some state voted to investigate bringing in the death penalty. I think that’s key and I don’t even know what state it is.

As for the actual results, I’m generally fond of the US government not being able to do anything, really I am. I might even have the desire to kind of hope that the Democrats take the remaining two Senate seats, if I thought they might use them not to confirm people, but I don’t.²

It’s not that I wouldn’t vote. The thing I like best about my own elections is voting. I’m reasonably pragmatic about voting, and I love making really complicated theories about the best way to use my vote (or really complicated theories about how to answer polling questions - once I was supposed to say that I was going to vote for NZ First, I can’t remember why).³ It’s just that they’re the Democrats; they suck beyond the telling of it. There are probably even occasions where I’d vote for a Democrat in a national race (although I think in the unlikely event that I moved to America I’d make sure I lived somewhere like Mississippi or Massachusetts, so I’d never be tempted to vote for president). I can also think of circumstances that I’d be glad they won. But none of this makes them an fraction more left-wing, or an ounce less of a corporate party. I don’t think it’s elections that bring about meaningful change, but organising.

This election has reminded me everything I find weird about American elections. Top of the list is the fact that you use a different voting system in each part of the country, and it’s elected officials who decide on the voting system.

But second is the fact that Americans vote for everything. In New Zealand all the power is totally centralised and the only thing we vote for is central government (we do occasionally vote for local government but they don’t control any of the most important services such as education).

So I have a question for everyone there whose just voted for the Secretary of State in California, or their local DA or the Insurance Comptroller (what on earth is that?), what difference do you think it makes that these positions are . I imagine that mostly it wouldn’t make a difference, but when would it would mean that . NZ has pretty much the same level of violent, racist, rapist cops across the country. Somewhere you have to elect the sheriff, there would be places where that would encourage violent, racist, rapist cops, and other places where it might not stop it, but it might curb it. Is that people’s experience?

1. Chalk that up to things you didn’t know about me - I’m enough Welsh to support the Plaid (if not Welsh to reliably pronounce it). (back)
2. It sounds like the Virginia Senate race actually resembles the Tauranga Electorate race - which my friend Larry described as sexism beating racism on the day (although it sounds like racism is going to beat sexism in Virginia - isn’t that special). (back)
3. My favourite was that friends who were too principled to vote for Labour or the Greens, but wanted Winston Peters out of a job should vote for the Maori party, on the grounds that the Maori party would have an overhang so voting for then would mean that they wouldn’t get any extra seats, but would make it less likely that NZ first would reach the 5% threshold. Then it was pointed out to me that voting for the Libertarianz would achieve the same result, and I was sad, because that was a really complicated bit of logic out the window. (back)

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: