All Our Lives has joined over 200 other organizations in endorsing this call for 3.5 million more health workers, especially in the Two Thirds World. This figure includes 350,000 more midwives and 1 million community health workers, who can help with providing certain reproductive health services, such as sex education and some family planning methods. No human being should ever have to die-or live less abundantly than he or she could-for lack of enough health workers.
Author: Marysia
More Mythbusting on Emergency Contraception
Richael at AmplifyYourVoice.org presents still more information about the power of emergency contraception to reduce abortions. Perhaps 50,000 abortions a year are prevented in the US alone through EC. All Our Lives wants to systematically challenge misconceptions about EC among prolifers. Please contact us if you'd like to volunteer on this initiative.
Blogging Against Disablism 2011: Adoption, Special Needs, & Choice–By Meghan
(Our second of two posts for this year's Blogging Against Disablism. Thanks to All Our Lives supporter Meghan for sharing her life story.)
In 1982, my biological mother found herself in a terrible position. Not only was she pregnant, but she was taking LSD, her mother was an alcoholic, and she was being abused by her mother's boyfriend. She had had an abortion three years before I was conceived. I'm not sure why she decided to carry me to term, but she did.
My Mom and Dad were also in a painful position. After giving birth to my brother, my Mom unknowingly used a defective IUD device that was later found to have injured thousands of women, including her. After undergoing several dangerous and unsuccessful corrective surgeries, she and my Dad decided to adopt.
I have no way to get my biological mother’s perspective on the adoption, information which would provide more insight into how the adoption process impacts the women who choose it. Because she has never tried to make contact with me, I’ve assumed that she would prefer to put the adoption in her past and haven’t attempted to contact her. I do know that the particular agency she chose was an ethical** one and hope she went on to have a joyful, fulfilling life.
I also had the pleasure of meeting my biological father and that side of our family after they made contact a few years ago. They are well and were very happy to meet me. In doing so I learned that I’m Cuban on their side. Although this revelation has had little impact on my life, it’s fun to have that information.
Both situations surrounding the choice of adoption were painful and sad. I certainly agree that it would have been wonderful if my Mom, my biological mother and our relatives hadn’t had to experience the heartbreak that they did. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the adoption that resulted from those experiences, for it was largely responsible for the success I enjoy today.
After I was born, I developed respiratory distress and had to be airlifted to another hospital, where I was placed on a respirator. Because of this I incurred a hefty medical bill. If the state of Kentucky had been unwilling to absorb those costs, it would have been too expensive for most people to adopt me and I would have ended up in foster care. Luckily, the adoption agency convinced the state that doing so was less expensive than taking care of me for eighteen years.
Over the coming years, my adoption afforded me with dedicated parents and stability, something that was particularly important to me as a person with nonverbal learning disorder. Nonverbal Learning Disorder is similar to Asberger Syndrome. NVLD makes it difficult to interpret social cues, which can lead to unintentional breaches of etiquette. It also increases one’s tendency to loose things and become lost, which enhances the difficulty of changing one’s routine. Because of the adoption, I did not have to struggle with the pain and disruption of being moved from place to place.
I also had parents who wanted me very much and who fought valiantly for my rights. As we navigated the educational system, my mother came to every meeting, every doctor’s appointment, and every vocal recital. My Dad and I took long nature walks and gardened together. Because of this love and advocacy, I was able to make the most of my intellectual, spiritual, and emotional gifts. I tend to believe that my parents sunk all the energy they would have used on having multiple children into me and my brother.
This care and attention helped me cope with the persistent bullying I experienced growing up. Whenever I came home from a long day of being told that I was hated, retarded, cursed, or what-have-you, my parents were there to tell me that I was gifted, beautiful, and unconditionally loved. I wouldn’t be the same person if it weren’t for their ability to counteract the vitriol I experienced.
If my biological mother or father had chosen to care for me, I believe that they would have found a way to do it well. If I had been placed in foster care, I’m sure that caring people would have helped me. Adoption, however, was an excellent choice because it enabled me to have everything I needed to grow up and achieve my goals.
Now that I am in graduate school, I volunteer as an educational surrogate parent, which involves making educational decisions on behalf of disabled students in foster care. There are many people in the system who dedicate their time to helping these students achieve their goals and rise above the difficulties they experienced. This makes me believe that they will be all right. Nevertheless, consistent advocacy and familial connection is a much more dependable option.
Every time I go to a meeting, I am grateful to my biological mother for choosing adoption and giving me the gift of parents who were able to be consistent educational advocates. If you are unable to have children and have a heart to help others, consider adopting a child with special needs who needs consistency and the unconditional love of a parent. Children with special needs can be adopted via foster care, international agencies and domestic adoption agencies.
Moreover, if you’re a prospective parent considering adoption for your child, don’t think that a child with special needs cannot be successfully placed. In fact, there are currently waiting lists of people wanting to adopt children with various special needs and disability rights advocacy have lead to more rights and opportunities than ever before.
Canada's Waiting Kids
Be My Parent [Britain]
Adopting a Special-Needs Child [how-to article for Americans]
AdoptUSKids [USA]
National Indian Child Welfare Association [for members of USA's First Nations]
National One Church One Child [helping to place African American kids]
**In an infant adoption, an ethical adoption agency will not pressure women or their partners into an adoption decision and will treat them as complete individuals with legal, financial and emotional needs. They will help navigate adoption options, including open, semi-open, and closed adoption and will be honest about all aspects of the process.
Blogging Against Disablism 2011: Reproductive Violence and Injustice Against Disabled Adults–By Marysia
(Our first of two posts for Blogging Against Disablism 2011.)
More often than not, issues of reproduction and disability are approached solely in terms of ablebodied parents and disabled children. Of course issues like prenatal diagnosis and abortion of disabled unborn children are critical parts of the story.
But not all people with disabilities are children, whether unborn or already-born. Some of us are in fact adults, even if we are overlooked or infantilized. Like other humans, we are sexual and reproductive beings. And we face many forms of reproductive violence and injustice ourselves.
Namely:
- Poverty, un or underemployment, poor housing conditions, poor nutrition, poor access to medical care, transportation barriers, and other problems that often severely undercut our ability to exercise our own sexual and reproductive preferences, whatever those may be.
- Stereotypes that we are either asexual, or grotesque sexual predators.
- Stereotypes that reproduction is a nonsequitur for us, or that we are by definition “unfit” parents whose “monstrous” breeding must be forcibly stopped.
- Heightened vulnerability to sexual assault and other abuse.
- Sex education that omits or glosses over us.
- Interference with our freedom to seek out and marry the partners of our own choosing.
- A long history of outright forced sterilizations and other pressures to use family planning methods we do not want, at the same time we are denied access to contraceptives we do want and that best fit our particular needs.
- Interference with our freedom to seek out fully supported parenthood, whether biological, adoptive, or foster.
- Intense pressure to abort when we become pregnant or partner to a pregnancy.
These injustices intersect mightily with the injustices resulting, for example, in the abortion or infanticide of children with disabilities. When I was pregnant with my daughter, for instance, a physician pressured me to have an abortion because he feared she might be “defective.” “You mean, just like me?!” I responded angrily. Hell if I was going to let him have his way with us!
Despite all the difficulties of that decidedly unplanned pregnancy- poverty, my ill health, disrupted life plans for me and my boyfriend, among other problems-I did have some resources for resistance, including the confidence that I could be a good mother. But what about other women who have disabilities and/or carry potentially disabled children-what if they lack the necessary resources? I already know the answer to that question. It is saddening beyond measure.
Even when and where it starts in the womb, the prevention and healing of reproductive violence and injustice against people with disabilities must continue ever after birth. And, as the disability rights slogan says, "Nothing About Us, Without Us." All of us.
Why All the Hostility & “Neutrality”?
In 2008 alone, something prevented an estimated 112.3 million abortions and 21.9 million miscarriages, and saved the lives of 1.17 million newborns and 230,000 mothers globally.
What is it?
Surely, one would imagine, it's something that groups who call themselves prolife would be all over themselves to promote.
One would imagine, unfortunately.
Because that something is: modern, voluntary contraception.
And most anti abortion groups are all over themselves to actively undermine it, or to profess "neutrality" on the subject.
When really, how can anyone be "neutral" about anything that spares women and babies so much misery and death?
Don't believe those statistics? They are here for all the world to see.
What’s Next? Wait, There’s More!
Jen isn't the only one at All Our Lives who is asking "What's next?" of those who seek to oppose abortion in such self-defeating ways.
I recently sent the following message to an organization that just brought controversial billboards on race and abortion rather close to home. Apparently the root causes of abortion are not eugenic and genocidal enough to claim their attention, even though attention to these and not simply to the end result, the incidence of abortion, would make a lot of unintended pregnancies and abortions go away.
Dear Life Always,
I hear that you plan to bring billboards into the African American majority areas of my city, saying that "every 21 seconds our leader is aborted."
Now I am pro every life, before, during, and ever after birth. And for this reason, I need to ask: why have I not heard of you coming before into the place where my family and I live, alleviating the very reasons why Black women and babies so frequently are involved in situations of unintended pregnancy, abortion, inhumanely unsupported parenthood?
Many Black women say they feel blamed and scapegoated by your billboards. Might this outcry not be a sign to you that your tactics are misdirected? Why not listen and learn in a spirit of humility?
I wish you'd take the money you are sinking into these billboards and spend it and fundraise instead on fostering everything and anything necessary to challenge the realities of institutionalized racism that account for the higher abortion rate among African American women, including the denial of health services such as family planning (prevention) and prenatal and postnatal care; institutionalized poverty; subsubstandard housing conditions; family and community violence; the enforced lack of educational and job opportunities; the criminalization of Black men; the ruthless stereotyping of Black women as sexually and reproductively feckless, irresponsible, destructive…
If every 21 seconds our leader is aborted, then prolife must mean getting on the case like this. It cannot mean anything one whit less. It cannot mean running away from or denying this full and inescapable set of responsibilities. And it must mean dealing with the fact that pregnancy and motherhood are twisted around by social conditions into forms of oppression that abort women's own leadership capacities!
And you know what? I'm sure Life Always is swamped with responses to these Obama-portraying billboards, but…I haven't heard back from them. And I wonder if I ever will.
Proposed Slash to Global Family Planning Assistance
All Our Lives belongs to the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, which addresses the shortage of family planning items among the global poor who want them. Already 200 million women worldwide want contraception but cannot access it. Is the US going to doom even more women to unintended pregnancies, abortions, and unsupported parenthood?
US Republicans are seeking to drastically cut US funding of UNFPA, the world’s largest family planning and reproductive health agency.
The proposed cut cannot be about abortion or coerced contraception. By law, US money cannot fund such practices. These two things also violate the mission of UNFPA.
So what is this cut about? All Our Lives has to wonder. Especially because UNFPA has played an important role in developing and distributing CycleBeads, a kind of natural family planning acceptable to people with religious objections to “artificial” methods.
Voluntary family planning is a basic human right. Why, once again, are US politicians trying to take it away-especially politicians who intone “prolife” but undermine everything necessary to prevent abortions?
Beyond Lamenting a Miserable Failure
The "prolife" movement as such, at least in the US–and probably elsewhere–miserably fails the sexual and reproductive rights and needs of young women. Instead of helping young women to prepare for and live healthy, happy sex lives and prevent unintended pregnancies and abortions, its sex-negativity and slut-shaming put them directly in harm's way. This story by Andrea Grimes is one bit of evidence. Realistically, what can those of us who believe in nonviolent sexual and reproductive choice do to serve young women's needs and undo the considerable harm done in the name of "respecting life"? Personally, I have been speaking out on this subject for over 25 years now. And I feel like I'm just beating my head on a brick wall.
Contraception Reduces Abortion: The Evidence
Some who conflate contraception with abortion and oppose both are gloating over a study from Spain. It reports that as contraceptive use increased, the abortion rate went up.
The researchers concluded only that the reasons for the increase in abortion await further investigation, which is the responsible thing for scientists to say when they do not know yet.
However, the conflaters quickly decided that it must be because people were having more feckless, casual, irresponsible sex; because they can't be trusted to learn how to use family planning methods effectively; and of course because so many of those contraceptives are really abortifacients.
Other hypotheses are far more plausible.
The bulk of the available evidence shows that in almost all situations worldwide, contraception reduces abortion rates.
One observed exception: if contraceptive services are increased, but they do not keep pace with people's desire & need for smaller family sizes, the abortion rate may go up, temporarily, and then finally decline when programming catches up. Scaling up family planning programs in anticipation of such an increase can help prevent it. In other words, more contraception does result in fewer abortions.
The bulk of the scientific evidence also shows that IUDs and hormonal contraceptives truly prevent conceptions rather than implantations. Please read this report from Family Health International, as well as this testimony from the World Health Organization from the debate in the Philippines over reproductive health legislation. The International Consortium for Emergency Contraception publishes this informative fact sheet on EC.
Other possible factors for the increased abortion rate in Spain merit investigation. For example, how prevalent were reproductive coercion and other forms of violence against the women studied? Women who are subjected to gender-based violence are far more likely to experience contraceptive sabotage, unintended pregnancies, and abortions.
And how did providers and communities educate, motivate, and support contraceptive users? Were they advised on how to share decisionmaking about family planning with their partners? On how to close the gap as much as possible between common use and correct and consistent use effectiveness rates?
These factors are harder to research than rates of contraceptive prevalence and abortion, but such research could boost the lifesaving effects of more family planning access.
Not Impossible
Marge Berer, editor of the journal Reproductive Health Matters, makes this highly problematic claim: "In my opinion, it is only possible to be anti-abortion if you will never be the one left holding the baby, nor be around to see or take responsibility for what happens to those who are." Really?
What about All Our Lives supporters and kindred spirits, in the present and in the past, who not only believe but live their lives as if prolife means what it says: the taking on, not the disavowal, of such active, thorough responsibilities? We can't possibly exist?
If respect and reverence for all life means anything, it means that you bother to hold the baby, or at the very least offer your helping hands to any and all baby holders, in your own family, community, nation, planet. You not only bear witness to their situations-you do whatever you can to ease their difficulties.
And that set of conjoint responsibilities begins towards both mother and child as soon as you know about the pregnancy. In fact, you should have long since already assumed the responsibilities that began well before the present pregnancy.
With the mother's and the father's own conceptions and beyond, with nonviolent and fully socially supported parenting, with sex education for all stages of life, with measures to prevent and abolish reproductive coercion and violence against women, with complete, informed, voluntary access to family planning.
Marge Berer, we do exist. We are not impossibilities by definition-let alone decree. And if you would like our help in reducing abortion, just ask.