The 2010 Global Maternal Health Conference starts in about 4 and a half hours (08:00 in New Delhi). You can follow the conference online here, including access to presentations and video, and participate in the conference discussion forum. Those of you on twitter, follow the hashtag #gmhc2010 for live updates!
Category: Blog Posts
Blog posts.
Call for submissions: This Bridge Called My Baby: Legacies of Radical Mothering
Via flip flopping joy comes a call for submissions for a book titled "This Bridge Called My Baby: Legacies of Radical Mothering." The proposal is long, so please click over to FFJ to read the whole thing, but here's the kind of submission they're looking for:
We invite submissions including but not limited to the following possibilities:
* Manifestas, group poems, letters, mission statements from your crew of radical mamas or an amazing group from history
* Letters, poems, transcribed phone calls between radical mamas supporting each other
* Accounts of your experience as a radical mama
* Your experience raising children as a trans mother or parent
* Raising children in a transphobic world
* Your experiences as a single mother
* Raising genderfree babies
* Stories of resilience and oppression as welfare warriors
* Reflections on enacting radical mamacity at different ages
* Motivations for/obstacles in your practice of radical mothering
* Conversations with your kids
* Rants and rages via the eloquence of a mother-wronged
* Your experience of radical grandmothering
* Parenting children through radically queer and loving modes of support, community, belonging and resilience
* Your take on reproductive justice
* Parenting from inside prison
* Extended family (both biological and chosen)
* Life as a disabled parent
* Your experience parenting as a teenager
* Raising Boys
* Gender socialization and Parenting
* Raising Biracial children
* Raising First World children
* Self-interviews, interviews with other mamis
* Birthing experiences
* Ending child sexual abuse
* Mothering as survivors (survival and mothering)
* Mothering with and without models
* Mothering and domination
* Mama to-do lists
* Mama/kid collaborations
* Radical fathering
* Overcoming shame and silence in the practice of radical mothering
* Ambivalence, paradox, emotions, vulnerability
* Experiences of state violence/CPS
* Balancing daily survival
* Loss of children, not living with children, custody arrangements and issues
* Sharing your stories from where you live
* Everything we haven’t thought of yet! Take a deep breath and WRITE!!!!This anthology will center the writing of mothers of color, low income mothers and marginalized mothers. [emphasis added -jr] If you have any further questions, feedback, suggestions feel free to contact us as well.
All Our Lives members and supporters have unique insights into many of these topics; please consider sharing them with the world!
Give the UK’s international development agency your views on reproductive, maternal and newborn health
The UK’s Department for International Development is conducting a survey on reproductive, maternal, and newborn health priorities.
People from around the world, and especially from developing nations, are encouraged to participate. This is an opportunity for reproductive peace activists to show support for all nonviolent reproductive choices for women.
All Our Lives at the Pax Christi conference
Co-founder Mary Krane Derr staffed a booth for Consistent Life (of which All Our Lives is a member organization) at the Pax Christi conference July 16-18. While there, she also took the opportunity to inform conference-goers about All Our Lives. She reports:
I staffed a table for Consistent Life at the national conference of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi USA, held in Chicago the weekend of July 16. Pax Christi is a longtime endorser of CL, so I did not expect to get into a lot of arguments. Indeed, most people who stopped by the table told me that they advocated a consistent life ethic approach in their work. This was not, they said, because they wanted to to de-emphasize abortion, but because life issues are numerous and deeply interconnected, and all of them matter greatly. Many expressed interest in CL's newest member group, All Our Lives, which advocates women's right to make nonviolent sexual and reproductive choices.
Nonviolent Choice Directory to Become an All Our Lives Project
Unfortunately, All Our Lives is not in a position yet to launch the dream feminist CPC described in our last blog entry. But that doesn't mean we will decline to address real-life pregnancy problems in whatever ways we can right now.
The Nonviolent Choice Directory, http://www.nonviolentchoice.info, will soon become a project of All Our Lives.
The Directory lists resources from all over the world that can help alleviate problem pregnancies and abortions. It covers:
–Post Abortion Care
–Male Responsibility
–Sexual/Reproductive Health Education (comprehensive)
–All Pregnancy Prevention Methods
–Crisis Pregnancy Support
–Mother & Child Health
–Parenting/Childrearing
–Adoption, Foster Care, & Guardianship
–Food & Nutrition
–Clothing
–Shelter
–Finances & Income
–Education
–Employment/Career
–Relationships
–Eco-Friendly Living
–Other Ways to Give Life
The Nonviolent Choice Directory was launched in 2007 to fulfill a promise made in the book Pro Life Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition.
You can email the Directory here: editor –at– nonviolentchoice –dot– info
It’s Our Ideal Feminist Crisis Pregnancy Center, Too
Surfin3rdWave at Feministing.com describes her vision of a feminist crisis pregnancy center.
It would:
- Refuse to engage in "slut-shaming…'marry your baby's daddy'…fearmongering."
- Foster choices in birthing, such as midwifery care, as well as in parenting.
- "Offer realistic parenting classes that promote responsible parenthood while also encouraging women to view themselves as individuals–with personalities and careers" apart from their parenthood.
- Give "free counseling services to women coping with anxiety and depression during an unplanned pregnancy," including access when needed to licensed mental health professionals.
- "Encourage pregnant women to view their bodies as beautiful and sexy…provide information about maintaining a good sex life and a positive body-image before and after pregnancy."
- "Help women find the financial and material resources needed to make it through pregnancy and give birth…[such as] the WIC program. Donors could bring baby car seats, maternity clothes, cribs, nursing bras, breast pumps, and canned goods…"
All Our Lives cofounder Jen commented on this post, saying that she shared this vision of a feminist CPC and our organization would like to run one like this someday. There are in fact ethically run CPCs who already engage in these services for women. And to the above services, we might want to add:
- Prevention measures such as comprehensive sex ed curricula, a full range of family planning options, and outreach tailored to groups of clients most at risk for unintended pregnancies, such as LGBT youth.
- Male responsibility programming.
- An advocacy department to work on systemic-level/collective changes necessary to alleviate the plight of so many pregnant women and reduce the numbers of unintended pregnancies and abortions, locally, nationally, globally.
- Standards to help existing CPCs evaluate and improve their services, and aid in the creation of new ones.
Please also see the discussion of Surfin3rdWave's post on the All Our Lives Facebook group.
All Our Lives Has Winning Idea for Universal Family Planning Access
The UNFPA blog Conversations for a Better World has announced the winner in its contest for best idea on contraceptive access for the 200 million plus women worldwide who want but lack it.
It's us!
Our proposal will be featured for a month on the website of Women Deliver, the just-concluded global conference on reducing maternal deaths.
Winning Idea: Access to Contraception Begins with Questions on the Ground
Please spread the news. It's not every day that the pro every life, pro nonviolent choice approach gets a hearing!
Join us in discussing reproductive coercion
We're having a discussion on the All Our Lives Facebook page about the recent article in The Nation, When Teen Pregnancy is No Accident. The Nation article looks at "reproductive coercion" — a form of partner abuse in which men deliberately try to make their partners get pregnant by tampering with their birth control or simply refusing to use any. Sometimes these men then force their pregnant partners to have an abortion; other times they force them to bear the child.
How should the reproductive peace community respond to reproductive coercion without promoting the violence of abortion? How can we best empower women to escape abusive relationships and maintain control over their choice to use contraception? Please feel free to comment here or, if you use Facebook, on our Facebook page.
Global MOMS Act
This is the kind of measure everyone, pro-life and pro-choice and label-resistant, should be able to get behind. On May 11, Representative Lois Capps (D-CA23) introduced the “Improvements in Global Maternal and newborn health Outcomes while Maximizing Successes Act” (also known, in a remarkably contrived act of abbreviation, as the Global MOMS Act).
The bill, H.R. 5268, would support expanded access to prenatal care, family planning, HIV treatment, skilled delivery care, emergency obstetric care, and postpartum care and support for women in at least 30 countries around the world. It would also support activities to improve child health care and decrease violence against women.
If you are a United States citizen, please contact your representative and ask him or her to cosponsor H.R. 5268.
Vote for All Our Lives’ Idea on Serving the 200 Million Plus Women Who Lack Family Planning
How best to serve the 200 million plus women worldwide who want but lack access to family planning? The UNFPA-sponsored blog Conversations for a Better World is running a contest for the best idea. Please vote for All Our Lives' entry! The winning idea will be presented at the upcoming Women Deliver conference for action against maternal mortality.