(Warning: This post is really long. Primarily because it took me about 3-4 weeks to write and research.)

Well, It seems like menstruation has been the hot topic on feminist blogs for the past few months, and I wanted to follow-up on my previous post about using hormonal birth control to suppress menstruation. For those of you who missed the earlier post here it is at Alas and at Rachel’s Tavern. My concerns about menstrual suppression revolved around three issues 1)the lack of studies of the long term health effects of this 2)the possibility that women may get pregnant and not know about it in time to get adequate prenatal care or have access to abortion and 3)the marketing and framing of menstruation as abnormal bad or gross. If I were to prioritize those three things, the last one is the one that I am most concerned about, and that is the one I would like to emphasize in this post.

Amanda over at Pandagon took exception to my view, and made this argument:

The problem isn’t discussing one’s feelings about it or anything like that, but I have a big, fat problem with the kneejerk assumption that “natural” is more valuable than “unnatural”. Every time someone praises menstruation as something that makes them feel like a woman or whatever, I wonder if they’re working for Tampax or something.

The only problem with that argument was that it was not my point. If I was making that argument, I think she has a valid point. I try very consciously to avoid the term “natural”–things like poison ivy and stinging nettles natural. The natural framework is problematic. First, off you’d be hard pressed to get people to agree on what is natural, and second we can’t assume that things that are “natural” are necessarily better than things that are created by people. I also think there are just as many people making money off menstruation as there will be on stopping menstruation. Whether you think a period is “natural” or not, we do need to understand that there is nothing abnormal about periods.

One commenter defended my position very well. La Luba said,

But traditionally, it is the male body that has been viewed as “normal” or “natural,” and the female body that is viewed as abnormal, unnatural, cursed, in need of “fixing.” Arguments like this are really intended to reclaim the female body as OK in its own right; that there isn’t something wrong with us, simply because our bodies aren’t male.

I’m not attached to “natural” as meaning “completely without medical intervention.” But I’m very suspicious of an effort by Big Pharma to focus the marketing of this pill formula towards women without problem periods. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. There is a lot of effective right-wing organizing towards abolishing birth control; Big Pharma is reacting to that by targeting the market in a way they know will have a positive effect on their bottom line–by reminding women of the negative aspects of their periods. That will create a demand. Women who wouldn’t dream of fighting for their right to control when and if they get pregnant will definitely get out in the streets to demand the right to live without a period–and don’t think for a minute that has nothing to do with the history of how women, and our menstruation, has been viewed.
Color me skeptical.

And yes, the fact that many women aren’t aware that “periods” while on the pill speaks to the fact that we are taught to be divorced from our bodies and their functions—that we are taught that our bodies are for being seen and being “done to,” rather than being active. I’m seeing this issue against a backdrop of how women’s bodies are viewed and treated, and I see Rachel’s point about semen. Semen has never been traditionally viewed with the negativity menstrual blood has. We haven’t heard semen referred to as “the curse” our whole lives.

I can’t see the marketing of this pill as being any different from the marketing of say, breast implants, or plastic surgery. Restorative breast implants and plastic surgery can make sense for cancer patients, or burn patients….but is this something the rest of us need, or should want? No one would question this “choice” if periods had been traditionally viewed through a neutral lens, as neither good nor bad, just there. That’s not the backdrop we’re working with here. Especially considering the religious overtones of “unclean” menstruating women; of “hysterical”, “unstable” menstruating women. Those myths are still out there. We are still fighting those myths. Whether or not an individual woman makes the choice to take this pill is immaterial. But whether this pill is seen as a “magic bullet” to rid us of the “hysterical” myth is very material. I don’t want a future of “but of course women are just as capable as men! we’re not hysterical anymore, ever since the pill! It’s only those women who don’t take the pill who are hysterical!!” arguments. There’s plenty of pseudo-feminists who would ride that train. (not that it would work. the bars would just be moved again.—but that’s another reason these conversations are necessary.)
I’m not saying that having this pill as an option is adding fuel to these fires. This pill is neutral, in and of itself. I’m saying it’s well worth questioning the why of this option. There are good reasons for making this choice, to take this pill. There are also good reasons for making the choice to not take this pill. Guess which choice is likely to be validated in an antifeminist, capitalist society such as we live in? A world where plastic surgeons make sales pitches in health clubs, because working out isn’t “enough” to make a woman “beautiful?” A world where women are more likely to swallow a man’s semen after oral sex than men are to perform oral sex on a menstruating woman (why is menstrual blood generally considered “ickier” than semen, hmm? wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact it comes out of a female body, would it?).

Natural hell. That’s not the bottom line for me.

Later LaLuba, also added the following comment which I agree with,

Who here is fetishizing “natural” I don’t have high blood pressure; does that mean I’m fetishing the concept of “natural” if I don’t take high blood pressure medicine?
I haven’t really noticed a mainstream tendency to fetishize natural. The mainstream tendency is to fetishize the “better living through chemistry”. And women’s bodies are the favorite battleground. For all the mention of fetishizing “natural”, I have yet to hear of a bottle-feeding mother being asked to leave a public place for not breastfeeding. It’s breastfeeding mothers who are regarded as disgusting, animalistic, filthy, unsanitary, and a public health hazard. Not to mention just plain slutty broads who want to show their tits. I have yet to see much cultural support for women who aren’t getting the full intervention workup. And yes, part of that is because historically, women were/are viewed as being closer to “animal” nature than men. I don’t like fuzzy-headed la-la arguments about some amorphous concept of what is-or-is-not “natural” either, but dammit, we are pressured to tamper with our bodies more than men are, and for specious reasons. Like I said before, there are good reasons for choosing this particular version of the Pill (in reality, a continous dose of the same-old-same-old Pill), but there are also good reasons not to. And women who choose not to are likely to be regarded as unclean freaks, the same way breastfeeding mothers are.
Look. This Pill has been around for generations. There’s a reason it is being marketed in this way, at this time. And it’s because of the pre-existing disgust women were taught to feel about our bodies. Yes, blood stains clothing. Yet people in general do not feel the same way about a bloody nose and a bloody cunt. There is a special revulsion reserved for menstruation. Why? It’s not just about the bloodstains.

I think we need to take a particularly strong stand against the phenomenon that La Luba addresses (in the bold writing). I strongly agree with this proposition. Marketing anti-period or no period pills really is really an ingenious way to help the fight against birth control. I can’t tell you how many young women I know who swear they take birth control pills ONLY to regulate their periods or cut down on period cramps. They say this because they know it is much more acceptable to say, “I am trying to feel better during my period” than it is to say “I’m having sex, and I don’t want to get pregnant.” I’m not chiding people for taking BCP to cut down on painful periods. I’m just pointing out that the “ick” fact associated with periods is something that the right wing embraces, and feminists need to be very careful not to embrace this too.

To me one of the underlying issues is body image—how we feel about our periods is part of our body image. Body image is not just whether we like our weight, breasts, or cellulite. It’s also whether or not we accept the bodily processes that are associated with women. A study by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals found that MOST women did not enjoy their period (71%) and would like to stop periods (62%). I don’t necessarily find this troubling. I did find some of the study’s other findings bothersome:

Forty-five percent do not avoid touching themselves when menstruating; but the sample was split on whether they thought menstrual blood was disgusting, at 37% disagree/strongly disagree and 37% agree/strongly agree.

I’m shocked at the number of women who will not touch themselves when they are on their period. I remember having an argument with a classmate in high school who believed that women were not supposed to bathe while on their period. She learned this from her mother who forbade her from washing during her period. One of the other findings I found interesting was the fact that 75% of women “believe men have a real advantage by not having the monthly interruption of a period.” On some level this is probably true, but I worry that people are not going to realize that it is the social arrangements of patriarchy that disadvantage menstruation, not anything defective in women’s bodies. Menstrual shame is a real issue that should not be minimized. In fact, Planned Parenthood dedicates a whole webpage to the subject.

The scientific community seems divided over the issue. The Society for Menstrual Cycle Research has released a statement on menstrual suppression. This statement includes results from three studies on the subject of menstrual suppression. Here is a quote on the study findings (the bold emphasis is mine):

Authors of the first paper, Christine Hitchcock and Jerilyn Prior, reviewed studies that have been published on extending the schedule of oral contraceptive pills in order to reduce the frequency of menstrual bleeding. They concluded that we do not yet have evidence to suggest that menstrual suppression is entirely safe and reversible. The second set of authors, Alex Hoyt and Linda Andrist presented results from a study of women’s attitudes toward menstrual suppression. They concluded that negative attitudes toward the menstrual cycle were a better predictor of women’s interest in menstrual suppression than women’s menstrual symptoms, suggesting the importance of psychosocial factors in women’s decision making about altering their menstruation. The third paper, by Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Jessica Barnack, addressed popular media coverage of menstrual suppression. From their analysis of print media, they concluded that regular menstruation is presented as bothersome and even unhealthy. Advocates of menstrual suppression and its benefits were afforded more space than opponents and risks. As with many other health issues, women are not getting accurate, balanced information, rendering an informed decision about this health care option difficult if not impossible.

While the response of this group is more tempered, the doctor who created Depo Provera, has a popular (but controversial) book arguing that menstruation is obsolete. (I still think menstruation is no more obsolete than semen.) Others advocate menstrual suppression, but don’t go as far. Here are two good sites that give information that is generally favorable to menstrual suppression—The Well Timed Period and No Period.

Some people, who disagreed with my previous post, took me to task arguing that I did not know what a period is. They claim that people taking BCPs do not have periods, just break through bleeding. I think what these people are missing the fact that the definition of a period is socially constructed, and the vast majority of people define a period as bleeding from the vagina as part of the cycle of a woman’s reproductive system. I know cases of women not taking BCP who were anovulatory, but still had monthly bleeding that they label as a period. Most women label the period in which they bleed as their period whether they are on BCP or not. Since my argument was more about the potential marketing of periods as icky disgusting and gross, I think the physiology of BCP is a moot point. What troubles people is blood coming from a woman’s vagina. They don’t care whether she has ovulated or not; they don’t care about the lining of the uterus.

Let’s be real menstruation needs a public relations firm. Imagine if I had written this post about diet pills or a new breast enhancement pill, making the same argument that women should have the right to take it, but that we should be leery of the marketing. I think we would see many more feminists up in arms. I have a feeling the response would have been much different, and I would have been getting high fives all over the place. The disgust with female bodies is widespread unless of course we are talking about the aspects of our bodies that are most accepted by men. (Having your breasts partially revealed on the cover of Maxim is good, but having your breast partially revealed while breast feeding invokes a totally different reaction.) I think views on menstruation are some of the most negative, especially when you have only 45% of women willing to touch themselves while menstruating.

I’m not saying that women should not take these sorts of BCP regiments. I believe in women’s rights to make decisions about our bodies. I also haven’t lost sight of the fact that our bodies have been and continue to be pathologized, and that’s a part of the reason that I still want my period.

Endnote: Clearly, this debate is very contentious among feminists. I collected several discussions on this subject, which are listed below. Overall, the feminist bloggers that I have read are fairly evenly divided on this issue, and both sides seem to feel passionately about the subject. Here are some posts on this subject: Pandagon, Shakespeares Sister, Feministing—Pt. 1 , Pt. 2 , Pt. 3, Niobium, Pandora’s Bazaar, Deanna Zandt, The Primary Contradiction.

As some of the language in this post suggests, I wrote it while my daughter was still in utero. It turned up during a spate of hard-drive housekeeping, and I think it’s relevant enough to be worth posting, even so long after it was written.

If I had a tenth of Amp’s cartooning skills, I’d turn the Cute Li’l Parasite into a cartoon, a sort of pro-choice counterpart to the faintly disturbing Umbert the Unborn. Umbert, for those who missed him, is a cartoon fetus that floats in some kind of misshapen uterus that has been detatched completely from anything resembling a woman (the hypothetical artificial womb, perhaps?) and spouts the pro-life line as well as any adult.

Another kind of fetus, almost completely unlike Umbert, shows up in Listen: Your baby’s life before birth, a free booklet I got as part of my pregnancy loot. Aimed at women and couples who have already decided to continue with a pregnancy, it can celebrate fetal life without undercutting maternal choice, and the picture it paints of the third-trimester fetus is a good deal more believable than Umbert.

My baby, now well on the way towards birth and personhood, is already experiencing the world. Sounds, both from within my body and from the wider world, reach hir, and sie’s already learning to recognise my voice. Sie can feel hir own body and the umbilical cord, as well as being aware when something presses against my abdomen and restricts the available space.

But what fascinates me is that, apart from sound and pressure, everything my baby experiences comes through me. Take taste - sie’s sensitive to changes in the taste of the amniotic fluid, which takes on the flavours of whatever I’ve been eating. By the time sie’s ready to be born, my favourite foods will be familiar to hir, but the foods I hate and never touch - sie won’t have a clue about them.

And then there’s emotion. When I’m angry or stressed or euphoric, my baby shares as much of the emotion as is attributable to hormones. Without the intellectual development or the life experience to name the emotion, sie can’t be said to feel angry or happy, but the physical effects are clearly there. When some trollish argument infuriates me, my baby tenses up just as I do, and when I’m travelling home from a match in blissful relaxation, so is my baby.

Pro-lifers have accused me of cognitive dissonance for treating my baby as a part of me, but sie feels what I feel. How can sie not be a part of me?

The other side of the coin is that I’m shaping hir experience of the world. My baby is already very different from a hypothetical clone raised in a hypothetical artificial womb, and this is the part where I suspect pro-lifers of some dissonance of their own. A pregnant woman does a lot more for the fetus than simply refraining from abortion: every decision I make influences what my baby will become.

Shortly before Mother’s Day, Save the Children released its annual report on the state of motherhood and infant mortality worldwide. As usual, the US does worse than almost every other industrialized nation when it comes to infant mortality (pdf file - see page 38).

The philosopher John Rawls suggested, as a thought experiment, imagining a “veil of ignorance.” The idea is, we sit around planning how to organize society from behind the veil; and none of us planners know what position in society we will hold, what race, what gender, how wealthy our parents will be, etc.. If the people planning society knew they might be born any race, any class, what society would they plan?

I don’t think they’d plan one in which infant mortality by race looked like this (source - pdf file):

As you can see, if you’re a newborn American infant, it kinda sucks to be an American Indian, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, and the suckitude is simply enormous if you’re Black.

* * *

Unfortunately, the racial aspect of infant mortality in the US is usually ignored in the mainstream media. Instead, the focus is on how bad the US does, compared to other countries. The QuandO blog, like many right-wingers, responds that it’s not that the US does any worse at caring for newborns. Instead, it’s that other countries give up on low-weight and otherwise unhealthy newborns more easily, counting them as “stillborns.” In contrast, doctors in the US work hard to save those infants - but since not all of them live, the result of the superior care here in the US is that our infant mortality rate appears higher.

In an op-ed piece, critics of the Save The Children statistics suggest that we should forestall trying to correct the US’s poor results:

If we want to lower our infant mortality rate so it compares better with that of other countries, maybe we should align our rules with theirs to better determine the actual extent of the alleged “problem.”

(Does calling the problem “alleged” and putting the word “problem” in scare quotes create a sort of double negative problem?)

My first question is, how does this critique account for the enormous racial gap in infant mortality within the USA? (It seems unlikely that in the US, doctors try harder to save babies of color while categorizing similar white babies as stillborn.)

My second question is, how much truth is there to QuandO’s critique? Some truth, but not enough to justify calling the US’s infant mortality rate, compared to other wealthy countries, an “alleged problem.” The OECD Factbook explains:

Some of the international variation in infant and neonatal mortality rates may be due to variations among countries in registering practices of premature infants (whether they are reported as live births or fetal deaths). In several countries, such as in the United States, Canada and the Nordic countries, very premature babies with relatively low odds of survival are registered as live births, which increases mortality rates compared with other countries that do not register them as live births.

Yet Canada and the Nordic countries all have better infant mortality rates than the US. So the difference in reporting practices doesn’t account for all of the US’s dismal performance in this area.

If it’s true that the U.S. does just about as well as other wealthy countries in infant mortality, and we only do worse because other countries move count as stillborn cases that we count as an infant death, then that should show up in higher stillbirth rates for those countries than for the U.S.. This is something we can check; a World Health Organization report issued earlier this year (pdf link) gathered statistics for stillbirths. So lets look at the WHO stillbirth numbers next to the infant and newborn mortality statistics from the Save The Children report:

The graph includes the five countries Save The Children credited with the lowest newborn mortality rates, plus Canada and the USA. Including stillbirths does make the US look better, and is consistent with the claim that other countries may be count some infant deaths (by US standards) as stillbirths.

However, most of these countries are doing as well or better than the US in all categories, including stillbirths. That’s incompatible with the claim that the US’s infant mortality problem is a statistical illusion caused by different standards for categorizing stillbirths.

To make this clearer, look at a graph combining infant mortality and stillbirth rates. (Newborn mortality is not included because the newborn and infant mortality categories overlap).

Even when stillbirth deaths are included, the US is still doing significantly worse than countries credited with low infant morality rates. It is therefore impossible that the US’s poor standing is caused entirely by the exclusion of stillborn children from infant mortality statistics (although this exclusion may be a contributing factor). The US’s terrible track record, compared to other wealthy countries, is not an “alleged problem”; it is an atrocity, and one that shouldn’t be swept under the rug.

***PLEASE NOTE***
If you’d like to avoid the comment moderation on “Alas,” you can also leave comments at the same post at Creative Destruction.

Many discussions on Alas have boiled down to the idea that much would be solved if people would just begin to trust women. Trust in their intentions, trust in their motivations and trust in their decisions. The simple phrase ‘trust women’ has been introduced in conversations about rape and abortion consistently here, and even highlighted in one of Maia’s stories as she reminisced about a banner that was in her high-school that really spoke to her. It’s this phrase that resonated with me when I came across a story via my parenting group that launched the blog of Chris Musser, who has dubbed herself the ‘reluctant lactivist’.

So yeah, I’m going to launch into another one of my rants about the importance of supporting mothers in their decisions to breastfeed their children. Here goes.

Reluctant was out a few weeks ago at Gateway Freddie’s (Fred Meyers) shopping, when much to her inconvenience, her wee one of three months decided he was hungry. They do that to you, and they don’t do it on your preferred schedule, but their own ““ fancy that. Having to maneuver herself, her three month old and her three year old daughter, she looked around for a safe and contained place to nurse her son so she could get on with her shopping. She chose a bench near the check-out. And guess what happened then ““ you’d be right if you said rude people happened, but it wasn’t enough that customers wanted to be asshats, management decided to get a piece of the action too.

On April 4th I sat down on a bench at the Gateway Fred Meyer to nurse my two-month-old son. It was about five o’clock on a busy Tuesday afternoon. The last place I wanted to be nursing was in that spot as it was noisy and distracting, but at the time, I couldn’t think of better place to attend to my baby’s needs. I also had my rather flighty three-year-old daughter with me, so wandering around the store to find a quieter spot would’ve left me instead chasing a toddler while carrying a bawling baby. [...]

After nursing for five minutes or so, my son seemed comfortable enough for us to start shopping. As I reached into my bag to get my sling, Troy Hardig, Gateway Store Director, approached me. He had a weird look on his face and as I was trying to figure out why he was approaching me when he opens with, “Oh, good. You’re getting a blanket.” He told me there had been complaints about my nursing, not that he minded, but that some people were offended. I was so stunned I couldn’t think of what to say, except to remind him that Oregon law protects a mother’s right to nurse in public. I felt absolutely humiliated. His comments left me feeling like I’d been doing something lewd.

Reluctant spent a few days feeling mortified before letting her very righteous anger replace the hurt, and she contacted one of the regional operations managers, and here’s what he had to say:

Unbelievably, when I spoke with Todd Heinle, Fred Meyers East Portland/SW Wash Operations Supervisor, a couple days later about the incident, he supported the store manager’s claim that I should have been more “discreet” and that three people had complained.

Now, my heart went out to Reluctant, but I also became severely pissed off when I read this. While it isn’t the closest or primary shopping place for our family, it is right smack dab in front of our doctor’s office so we do in fact go there. Well, did go there prior to this anyways (though I admit, Maddox has an appointment on Wednesday afternoon, and I’m ever so tempted to drop in and nurse her on that damn bench as an act of solidarity and support for Reluctant).

The story got the attention of KATU news, which did a good job of supporting nursing women by interviewing Reluctant while she nursed her son. And while Fred Meyer has at least offered a lame ‘oops, that shouldn’t have happened’, they get no cookie from this breastfeeding mother until they decisively make it clear to the public and to their employees that nursing mothers are not only welcome, but to be treated with respect and dignity. Reluctant has made a blog entry for people who want to offer support to her and other breastfeeding women by speaking out to Fred Meyer.

Following the links around, my favorite comments were from a woman named Marrit Ingram, who offered this:

American people want their lives to be totally antiseptic. We want to float around all day long in our individual bubbles of privacy and personal comfort. The world is our living room, and we want everyone on their company manners. If you don’t like mothers and babies, then by all means they should be expected to hide from you and not offend. It’s their problem, not yours. What’s a three-month-old doing in a store anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be on house arrest? Don’t you know that children annoy all the Real People who have a right to assembly? You might inconvenience someone.

These are strange times. Women are losing our reproductive rights, but we’re expected to raise children entirely in private without burdening anyone.

This got longer than I intended, but I’ll close with a customization of the rant I opened with, even though I know I’m mostly preaching to the converted:

Trust women that breastfeed to know when their child needs to be fed. Trust women to not be breastfeeding their child out of a malicious need to cause others discomfort, but rather solely for the nourishment and well-being of her child. Trust women when they decide the best place for the child to be fed when needing to nurse them in a public area. Trust women.

And beyond that, give ‘em a fucking break already.

From Slate editor Jacob Weisberg’s slam of the latest Kevin Phillips book:

…While Karl Rove’s pander-to-the base strategy got Bush narrowly re-elected, the entente hasn’t truly served Bush or the religious right. The appearance of extremism on issues of church-state separation and stem-cell research has helped dig a deep hole for the president and his party, alienating secular and libertarian Republicans uncomfortable with the revival-tent atmosphere. And evangelical power appears to have peaked. Since the Terri Schiavo debacle, the religious right has mainly embarrassed itself by battling evolutionary theory.

Oh, is that all the religious right has done? Silly me. I thought they were pushing for dozens of new anti-queer laws, many of which will pass (have already passed); and attacking reproductive rights throughout the country with a degree of success never before seen; not to mention vetting the President’s Supreme Court choices.

Queers and women really are invisible to many liberal guys, aren’t they? It’s like a superpower or something. I bet a pregnant lesbian could walk right into Weisberg’s home, while he was home, open up his wallet and take all the cash and cards while he was standing right there, and he wouldn’t see a blessed thing.

From Indianz.com (curtsy: One Tenacious Baby Mama), one reaction to South Dakota’s sweeping abortion ban:

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

My first reaction was: How awesome is that?

But at the same time, it’s too easy to go “wow, that’s great” and not give it any further thought. For a more thoughtful take, read this post from Brownfemipower, criticizing how white feminists too-often discuss race-related stories:

But almost *none* even question why there isn’t *already* an abortion clinic on Pine Ridge. Almost *none* of these bloggers understand that Native peoples are serviced by tribal hospitals–and tribal hospitals have been forbidden by Federal law to give abortions since the 1980’s.

They also don’t know that Native women are raped indiscriminately by white men who know they can’t be tried under tribal laws, Native domestic violence shelters are forbidden from mentioning colonization as a reason for the high rates of domestic violence in Native country, and that Pine Ridge just so happens to be the poorest community in the entire U.S.

(See also Melissa’s comments at A Womb of One’s Own).

An article in Indian Country discusses why this issue is especially important to American Indian women:

”I have very strong opinions of what happened. These are a bunch of white guys determining what a woman should do with her body,” Fire Thunder said.

Fire Thunder was a nurse and has worked with women who were traumatized by rape.

”When a woman is raped and becomes pregnant she does not have the choice of aborting. How many men at the state house have ever been raped?” Fire Thunder asked.

American Indian women will be impacted, if the law takes effect, in greater numbers than any other group. According to national statistics, American Indian women are sexually assaulted at a rate 3.5 times higher than all other racial groups. That means there are seven rapes per 1,000 American Indian women [that statistic is per year, I presume. --Amp].

”It is very important that we have access to safe, legal pregnancy termination services, whether it is emergency contraceptives right after the assault or an abortion service,” said Charon Asetoyer, director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center located on the Yankton Sioux Reservation.

She said her organization gets asked weekly by women for referrals. She added that her organization refers the women to Planned Parenthood.

American Indian women who live in the western part of South Dakota must either travel the few hundred miles to Sioux Falls or to Nebraska, which in both cases becomes expensive.

”This will force women out of the state and would cost more money and more time and a lot of women may not realize they have that option. It increases the trauma for those who have been sexually assaulted,” Asetoyer said.

”It’s this big myth that Native American women don’t terminate pregnancies; they have always terminated pregnancies, do now and will in the future,” she said.

Most of the stories I’ve read make it sound as if Fire Thunder is acting in isolation from the broader pro-choice movement. That’s not true; among other things, she’s on the board of directors of South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, the group running the initiative campaign to repeal the abortion ban. On the other hand, Planned Parenthood doesn’t appear to be entirely on the same page as Fire Thunder; they’ve released a statement thanking Fire Thunder, but also saying “We have no intention of closing our existing clinic in Sioux Falls, nor do we plan to open another clinic at this time.”

For more background information about President Cecilia Fire Thunder and Pine Ridge, check out this post at Wampum, reprinting a brief article from this past December.

If you’d like to donate some money to help support the proposed new Planned Parenthood (or the Oglala Sioux Tribe in general), Bitch PhD has the address. If you’d like to contribute to the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, here’s the info. If you’d like to contribute to the SD Campaign For Healthy Families, click on the image link to the right.

So I was doing some web surfing which I tend to do nightly, or at least when the kidlets and life in general allows for it. Some masochistic part of liberal me keeps surfing on over to DailyKOS, which I’ve done for several years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how often sexism finds its way into the subtext of the blogging that goes on there.

So yeah, we’re all pretty much aware that conservatives don’t have the market cornered when it comes to sexism, but it still rankles when I come across the more blatantly sexist remarks that are left completely unchallenged at DailyKOS. At this point, I’ll explain what it was I saw, and let you all be the judge as to whether I’m being perceptive or judging too harshly.

Ever since last years repeated snarks against women and women’s issues on KOS, I’ve taken the time every now and again to search for keywords to see if the tone has improved any. Suffice it to say I’ve rarely been pleasantly surprised; however I did find a little gem tonight that I had to share.

In a nutshell; a Kossack named Arion (I wasn’t sure at this point of whether they were a man or a woman) decided to analyze the decision to use ‘choice’ as the tag name for abortion. They felt that we should address the issue more honestly and call it the ‘freedom of abortion’ movement, since the real question was one of liberty. Well, the argument wasn’t that strong, and I found myself kind of bewildered at some of the comments, but they weren’t all in left-field. One person (woman I think) replied with ‘I’ll stick with choice thanks’, and another explained that the word ‘choice’ is hard to twist. Another person felt that the term had been tarnished because choice wasn’t implying enough seriousness to the issue ““ they suggested ‘motherhood choice’. About here I went from kind of bored browsing to furrowing my brow and muttering at my screen ‘wtf?’ Are feminist blogs so secret and rare that our fancy-schmancy terminology of ‘reproductive choice and freedom’ is just our well kept little secret?

At this point is where I started reading with a lot less charity. So the thread continues on to claim that really ‘we’ need a new frame for the issue that will work. It was then suggested that perhaps we ought to make inroads through pointing out gun control as being a potential ‘next’ on the chopping block with regards to personal liberties and rights, since the government cared that much about what wives are doing with gynecologists. That seemed a reasonable enough reminder when taking on the issue of abortion. Next came the part where I began to cringe as the fog was lifted and I was faced with some commentary that was absolutely idiotic, sexist and patronizing. Bottom line, we’re totally screwed if this is the average representative of the moderate democrats that should be our allies on these issues. Why, oh why, do the big name networks and politicians think that DailyKOS is all that.

…I mean really. Thanks, chum, for giving us women a place of pride on this issue. WTF???

So here’s the question, am I just being a judgmental meanie, or does this sort of commentary come off as chalkboard torture to anyone else? Or am I simply spoiled at the level of intelligence and freedom from sexism that feminist blogs offer compared to our generic liberal contemporaries.

Remember getting chickenpox as a kid? The parties that mom’s would have where kids would all go to someone’s house that had contracted it so they could get the virus and work it out into immunity? Nowadays they have vaccinations for everything - even the chickenpox. As these advancements continue to surface, the concerns about the potential side-effects of these vaccinations surface along with them, and the result is the requirements for vaccinated children are becoming a hot topic. Matt and I struggled at first with the different choices regarding the vaccinations of our daughters. We agonized through each one because of the frightening things we heard about vaccinations and their potential effects on children. As a side note, both Sydney and Maddox are being vaccinated and have done well with them.

So anyways, in another thread on Alas, vaccination discussions have surfaced due to the controversial HPV vaccine. What was interesting to me was that instead of the debate being about whether or not trace amounts of mercury are going to cause reactions, or whether by immunizing against anything we are weakening ourselves against everything, the theme is whether forced immunizations are similar to forced pregnancies. Gee wiz, I’d never even considered it that way, but I can see how the comparison could be made. So it got me to thinking, and here is how I feel the two are different, and how they are the same.

Herd Immunity v. Individual Choice: The most interesting idea to me that first grabbed my attention was the notion of ‘herd immunity’. Barbara made a good post explaining herd immunity this way:

Someone made the point that when it is forced on someone for the sake of others, how is that different from forcing someone to bear a pregnancy. For pro-choice people, we argue that we should after all have the right to decide what goes in and comes out of our body, full stop, right?

M had a pretty good response to this, that as a parent of a five month old infant I can certainly understand:

Even so, after some time thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that I don’t agree with forced vaccination, but I don’t agree that it’s like a forced pregnancy either. This is why; a forced vaccination is intended to protect and secure the health of the individual it is forced on, as well as others around them that are fully endowed with all rights given to a born person. A forced pregnancy on the other hand is to protect and secure the health of a potential person that is not fully or even partially endowed with the same rights at the expense or health of a fully endowed person. That to me seems like a pretty big difference, regardless of which end of the forced or suggested spectrum you fall within regarding vaccinations.

Forced versus Pressured: Is ‘forced’ used in the same context or does it have the same meaning in these two cases. When we look at what forced means in the context of vaccinations, the force is of a bureaucratic nature. It occurs by schools refusing to teach children that have not been inoculated, or refusing to allow them to come to school if they have gotten a waiver when outbreaks occur. That doesn’t really seem like ‘force’ to me, but instead precaution. I’m hard pressed to think of what a legitimate argument would be to this being a form of discrimination or undue force. It has options that are reasonable for the people who choose to forego on vaccinations. Forced pregnancy, on the other hand, has the very real potential of compromising and altering the health and physical make-up of the woman hosting the pregnancy. Forced pregnancy doesn’t offer choice, other than adoption, which isn’t really what I’d consider reasonable after making a woman go through the entirety of a pregnancy.

So at the end of the day, while I don’t agree forcing vaccinations on others (though I do strongly recommend that people research and consider vaccinations for the sake of their children and others), I’m going to have to give a thumbs-down on the argument that forcing vaccinations and forcing pregnancy are like arguments.

I really like to assume the best of everyone, even people I disagree with.

And I try hard to take what opponents say, at their word.

But sometimes it’s hard.

A lot of people who favor forced childbirth for pregnant women say that they believe that an abortion, even early in pregnancy, is identical to child murder. Have an abortion, shoot a four-year-old in the head; morally, it’s the same. Or, anyhow, that’s what they claim to believe.

In contrast, pro-choicers tend to think that the abortion criminalization movement is motivated by a desire - perhaps an unconscious desire - to punish women for having sex.

I used to reject that latter view as a pointless ad hominem attack. Nowadays, I’m not so sure. Although I’ve met some rank-and-file “pro-lifers” whose policy preferences were consistent with a belief that a fetus is morally indistinguishable from a child, those folks usually have policy preferences which are totally out of step with the abortion criminalization movement as a whole.

In contrast, the leaders of the abortion criminalization movement have consistently put their political weight behind policies which make little or no sense if they genuinely think that abortion is identical to child murder. And those same leaders routinely endorse policies that make a lot of sense if their goal is to penalize women who have sex - to, as I’ve heard many of them put it, make sure women “face the consequences” of having sex. And they’ve done so with the apparent backing and blessing of the vast majority of the rank and file. Let’s review:

Almost none of their policies make sense if they really see no difference between the death of a fetus and the death of a four-year-old. However, nearly all their policies make sense if they’re seeking to make sure that women who have sex “face the consequences.” are punished. After years of seeing this pattern repeated again and again, it’s difficult to take them at their word.

Recently there was a conversation on the safety of contraception for women, and whether or not it was ever fatal and how. I got this in the mail today due to having used ortho products in the past, and decided to share it as a heads-up to any women that might use or have used the Ortho Evra contraceptive patch. By the way, this is by no means offered in any ‘anti-birth control’ manner; in fact I’m very much for the safe and informed use of contraception period. So anyways it seems a potential class action suit is being prepared and they are seeking women who might have suffered effects by using Ortho Evra contraceptive patch - here’s what I got:

If nothing else, this is good information to have / know when you’re in the market for contraception, or someone you know is in the market for contraception.

The pro-choice movement can be a little insular; we are in a valley whose boundaries are defined by Roe v Wade on the one side, and the ever-shrinking practical access to abortion on the other. Cherry at Tortillas Duras has written a terrific post that attempts to look at reproductive rights from the hilltop, where a broader view is possible. What reproductive rights issues are those of us in the valley missing?

Here’s a sample of Cherry’s post. I don’t agree with everything Cherry says (for instance, would ending transnational adoption actually help “individuals who are not able to parent their children due to conditions created through imperialism,” and how do the needs of those individuals balance against the needs of people who are discriminated against by domestic adoption agencies?), but all of it is interesting; I’d really recommend reading the whole thing.

I’ve sometimes heard pro-choicers claim that second-trimester abortions only happen in cases of a threat to the physical health of the mother, or in cases of a non-viable infant.

That’s not always true. In some cases, the fetus is disabled but viable (there’s been some discussion of this on “Alas,” for example in this post). In other cases, the woman may have needed months to save up the money and put together the resources (transportation, days off, etc) required to have an abortion; this is particularly the case in states where pro-forced-childbirth forces have successfully put limitations on abortion access.

And sometimes, some woman are simply ignorant of how their bodies work, and may not even realize they’re pregnant until they’re in the second trimester… or until it’s for all practical purposes too late to get an abortion.

What puts this in my mind today is this must-read post by Angry Black Bitch. ABB isn’t talking about why second-term abortions happen, but I still think it’s relevant. Here’s a sample:

Go read the whole, it’s worth your time.

I try to see the best in everyone, including folks who are pro-criminalization on abortion. But their policies don’t make sense if what they want to do is reduce abortion. No one whose primary goal is reducing abortion should be opposed to sex education, or to contraception.

But it’s a perfectly sensible policy if what they want to do is make sure that women can’t have sex without having children.

Curtsy: Brutal Women.

Pro-life feminists exist - although the ones I respect are committed to reducing abortion by changing society so that women are much less likely to choose abortion, rather than by calling for forced childbirth for pregnant women. The “reducing demand” approach is, imo, perfectly compatible with feminism.

Unfortunately, most self-identified pro-life feminists are indistinguishable from their non-feminist counterparts. For example,: Nathan Sheets, posting on the “feminists for life” community, discusses the intact D&X abortion procedure (also known as “partial birth” abortion):

Contrary to what Nathan thinks, a woman’s body changes throughout pregnancy to prepare her to give birth. A woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, whose body has fully adjusted for giving birth, can safely deliver an intact baby head - usually. (Even at nine months, childbirth is still dangerous for a significant number of mothers.)

But late-term abortions don’t take place at nine months; virtually all of them take place before the 24th week. At that point, it’s simply not safe for the woman to deliver something as large as an intact fetal head, because her body hasn’t prepared for it. Which is why doctors compress the fetus’ head before delivery.

Even when the fetus is already dead (which is not uncommon with intact d&x abortions), a doctor performing an intact d&x will still compress the fetal head. Not to do so vastly increases the chance of the mother being injured, and would be medically irresponsible.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Nathan’s ignorance - or Nathan’s demonizing of women who have abortions as death-loving harpies - is all that unusual among the pro-forced-childbirth crowd, whether or not they self-identify as “feminist.”

(I originally wrote this as a reply to post on the feminists for life livejournal. But it turns out they don’t let non-members post, so I’m posting it here instead.)

Another link farm! As always, feel free to post about anything - including links to your own stuff - in the comments.

Blog Against Sexism Day
Congratulations to Vegankid for the huge success of the first annual “Blog Against Sexism Day.” (I badly regret not participating - I wanted to, but I was feeling too sick to do anything but lie like a lump in front of the TV. Oh, well, there’s always next year…). Vegankid has a list of some favorite BASD posts, and so does Andrea at the official shrub.com blog. (Edited to add: And Angry For A Reason has a round-up, too!) Check ‘em out.

Transending Gender: The Fourth Carnival of Bent Attractions!

Andrea at Shrub.com: How To Be a Real Nice Guy

Digby on Senator Napoli’s “Sodomized Virgin Exception”

New to the Blogroll: Feminist Law Professors Blog
A lot of the links below were taken from this blog…

Alice Ristrophe: A Feminist Critique of the Prison Rape Elimination Act

Ann Bartow Fisks The Times on Plastic Surgery For Butts

Spittle & Ink: South Dakota’s Abortion Application Form

The Well-Timed Period Catches The NIH Lying About The Morning-After Pill

Echidne: Misogynists in My Study

Ann Bartow: Rewriting Judy Bloom to modernize tampon technology

Amanda at Pandagon: Rewriting Judy Bloom to modernize tampon technology

Bitch PhD: Have Working Mothers Reached The Limit On Hours In A Day?
Bitch PhD comments on a recent Times article which suggested “that women may have already hit a wall in the amount of work that they can pack into a week.” See also this post at Workplace Prof Blog.

Hugo Schwyzer: Women Nowadays Are Expected To Remain Virginal Three Times As Long

Hugo Schwyzer: Reply to Anti-Feminists Attacks on Feminist Guys’ Masculinity

Vegankid: Don’t Kid Yourself

The Debate Link on “Judeo-Christian”
David discusses his annoyance at people who say “Judeo-Christian” when they really mean “Christian, but I want to sound more inclusive than I’m actually being.” I quite agree.

The Boston Globe: My Late-Term Abortion

Freakonomics: For Children Over Two, Car Seats Are No Safer Than Seatbelts

Political Animal: Why We Should Argue For Single Payer Health Care Instead Of Incremental Steps

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells: The Health Care Crisis And What To Do About It

Jill at Feministe: Fat-phobes go after Redbook

Washington Post: Moms At War
Good article in the Washington Post calling for a truce between working moms and stay-at-home moms.

David at The Debate Link sticks a cautious toe into the abortion debate, asks when personhood begins. (Actually, he asked the question a few different ways, but one of them was when personhood begins.)

Here’s what “personhood” means to me: the ability to subjectively experience consciousness; to have thoughts and feel emotions; to have a personality. This ability, in humans, is located in the cortex of the brain, where all our thoughts and emotions take place.

Why am I so focused on the brain as the center of what we are? Because the brain is the only part of a person’s body that cannot be destroyed while leaving the person still alive.

To see what I mean, imagine that you get an emergency call: Someone close to you has been in a terrible accident. You rush to the hospital, and are told that your friend’s heart has been destroyed. However, a tourist from Belgium happened to die the same day, in the same hospital, and luckily is a tissue match for your friend. (Luckily for your friend, not so luckily for the dead Belgian).

Repeat the same thought exercise, except this time imagine different body parts being replaced with a part from the unfortunate Belgian. A hand transplant. A kidney. Ears. Hair. Lungs. No matter which part is replaced, it’s still your friend. You’re not mistaken to feel you have an ongoing relationship with this person, despite the new heart/hand/kidney/ear/hair/whatever.

Now imagine that the doctors say your friend’s brain was utterly destroyed in the accident. But not to worry - they have put in the Belgian’s brain. The doctors tell you that your friend now remembers an entirely different life, speaks a different native language, and has a completely new personality; but other than that, she’s still the same person you know.

Does that make any sense? Is this the same person you considered your friend? Most people would say no. The survivor of that operation wasn’t your friend; it was the Belgian tourist.

In science fiction movies like The Man With Two Brains, some people can be reduced to brains in jar, but they’re still themselves, and audiences have no trouble accepting that notion. Why does that ring true with us? Because it gets at a core truth. Our brains - and in particular, the personality imprinted in the cortex - is the one part of a person that cannot be destroyed and still leave the person in any sense intact. But as long as that part is retained, we are still, in a meaningful sense, the same person.

So when does personhood begin? I don’t know. But I know that it can’t possibly happen before the fetus has a fully functioning cerebral cortex, capable of supporting thought.

In particular, it’s not possible for there to be any thought or awareness before the emergence of pyramidal cell dendritic spines on neurons, which happens relatively abruptly at about the 28th week. Pre-dendritic spines, the cerebral cortex might as well be a pile of gray slush, in terms of how well it can actually function.

Once the dendritic spines are in place, does the fetus become a person that instant? I doubt it. I think a working cerebral cortex is a necessary condition of personhood (in human beings, anyhow - maybe Vulcans are different), but I don’t think it’s sufficient. Once a fetus has a fully working cerebral cortex, to some extent that’s like having a blank hard drive; the hardware is all in place, but the data is still to come.

Nonetheless, as far as abortion is concerned, I find the scientific facts reassuring. Personhood, as I understand it, can’t even begin to exist until at least the 28th week - and probably doesn’t exist in any meaningful form until well after that point. But virtually all abortions - even those abortions usually referred to as “late term” abortions - take place well before the 28th week of pregnancy.

* * *

David writes:

Is a newborn baby a person? I think so, although its personhood is perhaps in a developmental stage.

Both the elderly and the disabled are people, as I’ve defined personhood above. The exception is when someone’s cortex is so extremely disabled that it basically stops existing at all, as in the case of Terri Schiavo. I am, however, prepared to defend the proposition that someone in the same shape Terri Schiavo was in two years ago, is for all moral purposes dead, despite the fact that their body lives on.

* * *

So if a fetus might be a person beginning sometime after the 28th week, do I think that post-28th week abortions should be banned?

No.

First of all, I’m not certain that there are any post-28th week abortions of viable fetuses performed in the US. (As it’s usually used, the term “late term abortion” refers to abortions that take place at week 18 and thereafter.)

But insofar as any do take place, it’s likely most take place in order to protect the life or health of the mother. I’m not prepared to legally force mothers to sacrifice their bodies to save a fetus’ life, any more than I’m prepared to advocate for laws forcing fathers to donate their kidneys against their will should their children ever require them.

Besides, it ultimately comes down to trusting women. I think pregnant women are the people who are best able to judge when a very-late-term abortion is necessary (in consultation with their doctors). I’m not convinced that the Senate is in a good position to make that judgment call.

Abortion has been in the news again here. Staff at the Waitemata District Health Board refuse to do late second trimester abortions on mental health grounds, so the District Health Board is subsidising women who are going to Australia to have the procedure done there.

Of course there are a number of issues here, first of all that staff can say “I’ll do an abortion if there’s signs of fetal abnormality, but not under other grounds, because the woman should just suck it up and go through pregnancy.” I actually don’t think that’s compatible with the law, which allows people to refuse to perform abortions on ‘moral’ grounds. I don’t see that sort of judgement as a moral one (of course I think that if you don’t want anything to do with abortions you should choose a speciality like geriatric care, if your morals interfere with your job choose a new job).

But it has also really drawn attention to how patchy New Zealand’s abortion provision is, among the different District Health Boards (This website has information about access in the different DHBs - although it is funded by the drug company which makes the abortion drugs). Almost all the abortions in the South Island are done in Christchurch (which in a way is a good thing because in Dunedin you have to go to the clinic four times, and in Ashburton you have to wait 1-2 weeks for an appointment). In Taranaki abortions are usually performed under general anesthetic (to give them a greater opportunity to kill the woman involved, I guess).

It doesn’t have to be like this, first trimester abortions is the safest procedure that is only done in hospitals. There’s no reason why first trimester abortions couldn’t be performed in your home.

Finally Family Planning pissed me right off in the interview with National Radio:

I think the whole area of abortion is a sensitive and contentious issue, and as I say the real answer is to say ‘why is it occurring?’ lets invest in health promotion and prevention to make sure that women don’t have unplanned pregnancy.

She went to say that if people are objecting to late stage abortions then it shows that late stage abortions are happening too often, and effort needs to be put into prevention.

She can go complain about women’s choices with her fellow Labour Party candidate George Hawkins.

I’m more and more convinced that the rest of us need to do something.

Also posted on my