Category: Blog Posts

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Blog Posts, Past Actions

Take action for VAWA today

Jen R

Today is the National Day of Action for the Violence Against Women Act.

It has been 679 days since VAWA expired, and 183 days since Congress’ last action on VAWA. It’s time for them to get back to work.

Call and tweet your Representatives and Senators today! If you’re tweeting, use the hashtag #PassVAWA2012. Tell them to pass a VAWA that safely and effectively protects all victims.

If your Senator is not on the list of cosponsors or if your Representative voted for the inferior House substitute bill, and if that person identifies as a pro-lifer, it may help to remind them of the links between violence against women, unintended pregnancy, and abortion. Let them know that you see ending violence against women as a pro-life issue.

By the end of the day, every Member of Congress will hear a unified message: Work out the differences, pass VAWA before this Congress ends and you go home for the holidays. Do not let VAWA die and miss this chance to help victims find shelter, help and justice. There is precious little time left and victims’ lives and futures are in the balance.

Blog Posts

Violence Against Women Act Day of Action Wednesday, November 14

Jen R

Ending violence against women is a pro-life issue. That’s why we are asking you to join us and other advocates for women on Wednesday, November 14 for a Violence Against Women Act Day of Action. Please check back on that day for information on how to contact your legislators.

The Senate passed a version of the VAWA reauthorization with bipartisan support earlier in the year, with new provisions to help Native American, LGBT, and immigrant victims of violence. The House passed a substitute bill that omits these provisions and otherwise weakens the Senate version. Advocates argue that the House bill actually creates new dangers for undocumented women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Anti-violence advocates in the U.S. have not given up hope of passing the VAWA reauthorization in the lame duck legislative session. Please join us on Wednesday in urging Congress to restore the protections of the Senate bill and pass the reauthorization.

Blog Posts

How Best to Abolish Female Feticide?

Marysia

Abortion opponents in the US are talking about the horrendous numbers of sex selective abortions in some Asian nations, especially India and China. Kristen Walker Hatten, for example, writes at LifeNews.com about the “horrifying, misogynistic third-world practice of gendercide.”

But she doesn’t offer any plans for transforming the cultural conditions that lead to such wide-scale abortion of baby girls, before or after birth, except to legally ban it. Never mind that in India, for example, there are already legal restrictions on sex selective abortion. And yet it continues, because violence against girls and women at all phases of life persists.

Walker Hatten concludes that if you don’t support a legal ban, you don’t care about the problem. She asks, “Where are the feminists?” when both prolife and prochoice feminists have been speaking up and agitating for years. She seems even less informed about feminists from within India, for example, who both support abortion rights and seek to abolish sex-selective abortion in conjunction with other lethal practices against girls and women. She would do well to familiarize herself with Rita Banerji of the 50 Million Missing Campaign, for one.

Walker Hatten is also quite problematic when she speaks of gendercide as a specifically “third-world practice” that has spread into the US via immigrants. In the process, she trivializes or renders invisible and inaudible any resistance from within Asian countries to sex selective abortion. She simultaneously obscures the violence against women and girls that is also epidemic in the US culture and contributes to the incidence of abortion there and in many other countries, according to recent scientific literature.

Her argument, like that of many other US abortion opponents, draws, however intentionally or not, upon a centuries-old view of brown, non-Christian, “uncivilized,” “unenlightened” people as uniquely guilty of barbarities against women–and white Christians as their “civilized,” “emlightened” saviors from their misogyny. As if violence against women and girls was not a curse of all religions, cultures, and nations; how else is it that one in three females worldwide has been subjected to gender-based violence?

But her argument, like all too many arguments from US abortion opponents, doesn’t help to abolish female feticide. Such antiabortionists hold one part of humankind responsible while letting another part off the hook, or off too lightly. And their accusation that feminists don’t care cuts off the possibilities of cooperative action with feminists, whether prolife or prochoice, who do care profoundly, and in fact have been seeking and working for much deeper, more decisive solutions than a legal ban for a long time.

We agree with Walker Hatten, of course, that female feticide is horrifying and should be abolished. We also believe that unless prenatal lives are generally treated as if they have inherent value, it is much more difficult to make a case, whether legal, ethical, or cultural, against aborting one specific group of fetuses.

But we cannot accept her blanket accusations about feminist indifference or complicity, let alone the attitudes regarding race, religion, culture, and nationality that arguments like hers encode, intentionally or not. In fact, if we didn’t care about abolishing gendercide, why would we risk the wrath of the US antiabortion movement as such?

Blog Posts

Early Feminists on Abortion: A Still-Relevant Herstory

Marysia

(Reprinted from the Fall 2012 Life Matters Journal. An earlier version, titled “What the First Wave of Feminism Can Teach the First Wave of Common Ground” appeared at RHRealityCheck.org on July 9, 2009.)

Feminists of the 1960s and 70s were hardly the first to address abortion. Their nineteenth and early twentieth century foremothers also took a strong, if–to many today—unexpectedly oppositional stance. Since at least the late 1980s, prochoicers and prolifers have repeatedly, heatedly disputed the precise content and meaning of this herstory. After over two decades of research and writing on this subject, I cannot agree with prochoicers who outright deny that early feminists opposed abortion, or who claim that this opposition was for now irrelevant or retrograde reasons. Nor can I side with abortion opponents who crudely invoke early feminists even as they defend policies that harm women, such as restricted access to family planning (pregnancy prevention) services.

So what did early feminists really say and do regarding abortion, and why?

While I cannot here do justice to the abundant, many-voiced early feminist literature on abortion, I can briefly outline a consensus shared by everyone from anarchist, freethinking “free lovers” to Women’s Christian Temperance Union members. For documentation of primary and secondary sources, please consult the book I coedited with Rachel MacNair and Linda Naranjo-Huebl, ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today: Second Expanded Edition (FNSA/Xlibris, 2005), as well as my article “Activism Through the Centuries” in Consistently Opposing Killing, edited by Rachel MacNair and Stephen Zunes (Praeger, 2008).

Like some who identify as feminists today, early feminists opposed abortion out of a belief that life began at conception and acquired human rights at that point. The context of this belief was something parallel to a present-day consistent life ethic. Early feminists’ concern for prenatal lives was hardly single-issue. It was interwoven with their robust advocacy for women, especially their defense of women’s nonabortion reproductive rights, and for already-born children. It was hardly unrelated to their challenges against racism, classism, imperialism, the death penalty and war and (in many cases) their promotion of animal welfare and practice of vegetarianism.

Early feminists did not oppose abortion simply in deference to its illegality. They nonviolently challenged many quite legal practices, such as the denial of women’s right to vote, marital rape and domestic violence, and bans on the open discussion and provision of family planning. Early feminists were deeply concerned about the danger to women’s lives from doubly unsafe procedures. At the same time, they spoke about any abortion that killed a woman as a taking of two lives, not one.

Early feminists demanded, and themselves created, greater social supports for pregnant and parenting women and their children. Single mothers and their children were ruthlessly denied food, clothing, shelter, and health care on the grounds that this was aiding and abetting “immorality.” Many single mothers could not survive without going into prostitution. Married mothers, too, struggled in isolation with such difficulties as domestic violence and economic insecurity. If they were middle or upper class, they faced enforced economic dependence; if working class, toxin-riddled, unsafe jobs that failed to pay living wages or allow for healthy child care practices. As happens today, pious rhetoric about the sacredness of marriage, home, and family frequently obscured these difficulties and blocked effective solutions.

Early feminists squarely held men responsible for any children they conceived, inside or outside marriage. They called men to responsibility in an even more radical way, starting with antislavery documentation of sexual and reproductive outrages that white men committed against African American women and children. As Matilda Joslyn Gage stated, no “subject lies deeper down into woman’s wrongs” than “the denial of the right to herself.”

Although this might seem very strange to today’s prochoicers, when early feminists spoke of a woman’s “right to herself” or “right over her own body,” for them this did not include a right to abortion. It did encompass many measures that would empower women to prevent unintended pregnancies, abortions, and cases of difficult motherhood. Woman’s right to her own body unquestionably meant her right to choose whether, when, and with whom she wished to have penis-vagina sex and thus face the possibility of conception. In other words, it meant freedom from rape, inside and outside of marriage—at a time when the very notion of marital rape was laughed at, even more than it is today. Despite the prevailing cultural belief that “virtuous” women should remain ignorant, feminists also insisted upon thorough sexual/reproductive health education as part of woman’s body-right.

Against widespread contempt for “old maids” like Susan B. Anthony, early feminists defended women’s right and ability to choose a generative singlehood. Although voluntary pregnancy prevention was cast and abhorred as some monstrously wicked, selfish shirking of maternal duty, many early feminists stood up for women’s liberty to use contraceptives and even resort to “Dianaism,” or sexual practices other than penis-vagina intercourse. In a time when women were reviled or pitied even more than they are today for not marrying men, a number of women’s rights activists openly chose “Boston marriages,” or committed same-sex domestic partnerships, or at the very least warmly supported their friends and colleagues who made this choice.

Could the herstory of early feminists on abortion still mean something for today’s abortion debate–other than more pointless, unproductive argument that leaves real-life women and children, born and unborn, out in the cold? Despite all the bickering I have heard and despaired over, I dare to hope so. I believe that this herstory holds two-at least two–big lessons for the present time.

First, many—not all, but many—prochoicers and prolifers alike can validly claim these pioneering feminists as foremothers. Substantial numbers on both “sides” share a consciousness of women’s and already-born children’s rights arising from shared historical sources. Second, if people from both “sides” share this consciousness, they can together contemplate the early feminist analysis of causes and solutions for unintended pregnancy and abortion. They can ask: How does this analysis fit and no longer fit the present? To what particular collective as well as individual responsibilities does it invite us?

What if a strong prochoice-prolife coalition demanded a toxin-free environment, a better child support enforcement system, a living wage, paid family leave, and genuinely universal health care, including a full choice of voluntary family planning methods, prompt access to quality prenatal care, and drug rehabilitation for those who need it? What if we redesigned schools, workplaces, places of recreation, and religious facilities to be truly family-friendly, to all kinds of families?

In regard to abortion itself, today’s prolifers and prochoicers obviously draw the parameters of a woman’s body-right differently. For many prolifers, pregnancy interconnects two equally valuable bodies and lives. For many prochoicers, pregnancy is a matter of one body and life, the woman’s, and/or perhaps a fully realized life nurturing a potential life inside of herself. But why can’t both “sides” at least cooperate on defending a woman’s body-right before conception?

Comprehensive sex education already enjoys a broad base of public support. It can incorporate strong messages of male responsibility and nonviolence towards women and children, as well as teaching young women the assertiveness and self-respect vital to making positive decisions about their bodies and lives.

And rooted as it is basic rights of health, speech, association, religion, and privacy—freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention is another potentially large area of common ground. This includes the right to personally choose, or not choose, from among the various reversible or permanent contraceptive methods, fertility awareness/natural family planning, abstinence/celibacy, and sexual practices other than penis-vagina sex, whether in the context of straight or LGBT relationships. I’m not one of them, but I hope people with religious or ethical objections to any of these practices can agree that it is not government’s place to decide specifically how any of us do or do not exercise this right—even if government is responsible for ensuring that everyone can exercise it freely.

At the same time, I would like skeptical prochoicers to consider that prolifers may already be more supportive of woman’s body-right than expected. I personally have advocated this right for years, and know other prolifers who have done the same. We are not isolated cases—as shown by the appeal of All Our Lives, a nonprofit that I cofounded with Jen Roth. This nonprofit organization describes itself as “pro every life” and “pro nonviolent sexual and reproductive choices.”

If prolifers and prochoicers both take up and work steadily on these shared reproductive justice responsibilities, both at the collective and individual levels: what will our descendants be talking about and doing in a century or two? What places will unintended pregnancy and abortion have and not have in their society? I for one would love to know! Surely such a cooperative effort will both expand women’s choices and protect the lives of the unborn. And—even though we cannot be sure of what they would think—wouldn’t our feminist foremothers be proud of us, at long last?

Blog Posts

Drawing Connections: Intimate Partner Violence, Poverty, and Abortion

Jen R

[Author’s note: this article was originally published in Life Matters Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1.]

The consistent life ethic is traditionally seen as a way to draw connections among issues that do not seem related at first glance, such as war, the death penalty, and abortion. However, the connections between forms of violence and injustice are sometimes more immediate. Recent research, including a study published in August 2012 by the Guttmacher Institute, has highlighted connections between intimate partner violence, poverty, and abortion.

Intimate partner violence and abortion

Multiple studies from countries around the world have established a link between intimate partner violence (sometimes also known as domestic violence) and unintended pregnancy and abortion.[i],[ii],[iii],[iv]

The increased abortion rate among women who have experienced intimate partner violence begins with an increased prevalence of unintended pregnancy. A health survey in Massachusetts found that 40% of women who reported being abused had experienced one or more unintended pregnancies in the past five years, compared to 8% of non-abused women.[v]

Women in abusive relationships who become pregnant face numerous pressures to abort. These include fear of being punished if their partner doesn’t welcome the pregnancy, fear that the child will be abused, and the belief that having a child will make it impossible to leave the abusive partner for good. Among women who had abortions in the United States in 2008, about 7% reported having been physically or sexually abused by their child’s father, compared with about 1% of women in the general population who report experiencing physical or sexual abuse in the previous 12 months.[vi]

Reproductive coercion

In 2010, University of California-Davis researcher Elizabeth Miller and colleagues conducted the largest study to date of a phenomenon Miller has termed reproductive coercion[vii]. Miller’s team surveyed women aged 16-29 seeking reproductive health services in five clinics in northern California. Of these women, 53% had ever been physically or sexually abused by a partner. Nineteen percent had experienced pregnancy coercion, defined as a male partner using emotional or physical pressure or threats to get a woman to agree to become pregnant. Fifteen percent had experienced birth control sabotage, in which their partner had deliberately interfered with their efforts to use birth control. Miller uses the umbrella term reproductive coercion to cover pregnancy coercion and birth control sabotage.

Reproductive coercion is often associated with intimate partner violence and may partly explain why intimate partner violence is associated with high rates of unintended pregnancy.

Guttmacher study of “disruptive life events” and abortion

In August 2012, the Guttmacher Institute published a study in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care about the circumstances under which women have abortions. The researchers surveyed 9493 women who had abortions, and found that most had experienced at least one “disruptive life event” in the last year, such as unemployment, divorce or separation from a partner, getting behind on the rent or mortgage, moving two or more times, or having a baby.[viii]

The women in the study who were living in poverty experienced more disruptive life events – and hence, more abortions – than the women who were making greater than poverty incomes. Women living in poverty were also more likely to report having been physically or sexually abused by their partners.

In addition to the quantitative survey, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 49 women. Nearly half of these women said that disruptive events interfered with their ability to use contraception consistently. Women reported losing health insurance and having trouble affording prescription contraception and getting to doctor’s appointments. Consistent use, not simply any use of contraception, is key to preventing unintended pregnancy. Poverty and disruptive life events appeared to make consistent use more difficult.

There were no questions on the quantitative survey about reproductive coercion, but six of the 49 women interviewed in-depth reported experiencing it.

Conclusions

Intimate partner violence and poverty both make it more difficult for women to avoid unintended pregnancy and to carry to term if they become pregnant.

For pro-life advocates who are working to reduce the demand for abortion, these data suggest two courses of action. The first is working to end poverty and abuse themselves, and ensuring a strong social safety net to buffer against the effects of disruptive life events. Second, it is also important to ensure that women currently experiencing poverty and abuse have the information and health care access they need to prevent unintended pregnancy, as well as social and material support if they do conceive.

Mitigating the effects of injustice and working to end the injustice itself are not mutually exclusive approaches. As one example, Elizabeth Miller and colleagues reported in 2011 on a pilot program that tested a new harm reduction intervention for women experiencing abuse or reproductive coercion.[ix] Their intervention enhanced standard intimate partner violence counseling with information on reproductive coercion and strategies for minimizing the risk of unintended pregnancy by using birth control methods that were concealable or hard to tamper with. The enhanced intervention both reduced the incidence of reproductive coercion and increased the likelihood that women would leave abusive male partners.

Protecting lives that are threatened by poverty and intimate partner violence also turns out to be a way to protect lives that are threatened by abortion.

 

[i] Christina C. Pallitto, Claudia García-Moreno, Henrica A.F.M. Jansen, Lori Heise, Mary Ellsberg, Charlotte Watts, on behalf of the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Intimate partner Violence, Intimate partner violence, abortion, and unintended pregnancy: Results from the WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Intimate partner Violence, Int J Gynecol Obstet 2012. Published online in advance of print September 6, 2012. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgo.2012.07.003. Accessed September 17, 2012.

[ii] Lockart I, Ryder N, McNulty AM. Prevalence and associations of recent physical intimate partner violence among women attending an Australian sexual health clinic. Sex Transm Infect 2011; 87(2): 174-176.

[iii] Alio AP, Salihu HM, Nana PN, Clayton HB, Mbah AK, Marty PJ. Association between intimate partner violence and induced abortion in Cameroon. Int J Gynecol Obstet 2011; 112(2): 83–87.

[iv] Fanslow J, Silva M, Whitehead A, Robinson E. Pregnancy outcomes and intimate partner violence in New Zealand. Aust N Z J Obstet Gynaecol 2008; 48(4): 391–397.

[v] Futures Without Violence. The Facts on Reproductive Health and Partner Abuse. Available at: http://www.knowmoresaymore.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/The-Facts-on-Reproductive-Health-and-Partner-Abuse.pdf. Accessed September 17, 2012.

[vi] Jones RK, Moore AM, Frohwirth LF. Perceptions of male knowledge and support among U.S. women obtaining abortions. Women Health Iss 2011; 21(2):117-23.

[vii] Miller E, Decker MR, McCauley HL, Tancredi DJ, Levenson RR, Waldman J, Schoenwald P, Silverman JG. Pregnancy coercion, intimate partner violence and unintended pregnancy. Contraception 2010; 81(4):316-22.

[viii] Jones RK, Frohwirth L, Moore AM. More than poverty: disruptive events among women having abortions in the USA. J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2012; published online in advance of print August 20, 2012. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jfprhc-2012-100311. Accessed September 17, 2012.

[ix] Miller E, Decker MR, McCauley HL, Tancredi DJ, Levenson RR, Waldman J, Schoenwald P, Silverman JG. A family planning clinic partner violence intervention to reduce risk associated with reproductive coercion. Contraception 2011; 83(3):274-80.

 

Blog Posts

I respectfully decline your condescending lecture

Jen R

A column by Thomas Friedman titled “Why I Am Pro-Life” is making the rounds. I’d been ignoring it because I have a policy of ignoring anything Thomas Friedman writes, but after about the 1,926th time this thing crossed my path, I got fed up. I am 100% on board with criticizing the hypocrisy of people who claim to respect life but oppose universal health care, oppose life-saving environmental care, and hawk war and guns. But criticizing those people isn’t a free pass to avoid examining your own inconsistency.

The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Wonderful! I agree! But you will let that label apply to people for whom sanctity of life begins at birth. You will sneer at the notion of wanting to protect “every fertilized egg in a woman’s ovary” (since corrected, but a handy reminder that ignorance about how reproduction works is not confined solely to the far Right). “What about the rest of life?” you ask, but I could ask you the same question: what about the life you minimize and deride and don’t consider part of the human family?

I’m getting pretty tired of people who divide the world into two groups — those who only care about protecting human life before birth, and those who only care about protecting it after — and congratulate themselves on their superiority for being in the latter.*

What about being pro-everyone’s-life? Funny how that possibility never arose in Friedman’s column, or in any of the smug tweets and Facebook shares and blog comments using it as a club to beat those horrible pro-lifers with.

Finally, as someone who actively opposed the Iraq War for which he was a cheerleader, I decline to accept a lecture on the sanctity of life from Thomas Friedman, thank you very much.

*(Edited to add, because I want to be clear: I don’t think a person has to be for banning abortion to respect prenatal life. But I do think they have to talk about that life as one of us. They have to treat its destruction like it matters and is more than simple personal choice. They have to favor trying to prevent abortion, in every just way, because it ends a human life. If you’re doing all those things but identify as pro-choice because you don’t think legal bans are the answer, you’re not who I’m talking about here.)

Blog Posts

In the news: family planning

Jen R

Yesterday, the New Evangelical Partnership held an event at the National Press Club to unveil a statement called “A Call to Christian Common Ground on Family Planning, and Maternal, and Children’s Health.”

The statement makes three main points:

  1. Family planning strengthens families and creates more stable and healthy communities worldwide.
  2. Family planning protects the health of women and children.
  3. Family planning reduces abortion.

We agree wholeheartedly, of course, and are pleased to have the New Evangelical Partnership as part of the movement for family planning freedom.

You can watch the whole event on YouTube. I recommend at least watching Rev. Jennifer Crumpton’s presentation of the NEP statement, starting at about 8:15 in, Dr. Mark Hathaway’s talk at 19:00 about the medical benefits of family planning for women and children, and Katherine Marshall’s talk at 28:10 about the international context of family planning.

Speakers at the NEP event referred more than once to a study recently conducted by Washington University in St. Louis. The project provided women and teens at high risk of unintended pregnancy with the contraceptive method of their own choice at no cost. The results were dramatic. The abortion rate fell to 6 per 1,000 women, compared with a national average of 20 per 1,000 women. The teen birth rate from to 6.3 per 1,000, compared with 34.1 per 1,000 nationwide.

Imagine the impact of cutting the abortion rate in the U.S. by almost two thirds.

As the Agence France write-up of the study noted: “If the same results were replicated across the United States, free birth control could prevent 1,060,370 unplanned pregnancies and 873,250 abortions a year.”

Yes, that’s a big “if.” [Edited to add: as the researchers pointed out, the sample of women who participated in this study is not generalizable to the total population of women of reproductive age in the United States. That said, they likely bear a great deal of similarity to the population of women at the highest risk for unintended pregnancy and abortion.] And of course, there are important caveats. Women’s consent must be free and fully informed. Women must never be coerced into using long-acting contraception because other people think it would be better for them not to reproduce. It must always, always be the woman’s choice to use contraception. In addition, protection against HIV or other STDs is vital, and the forms of contraception chosen by most women in the study did not provide that protection.

But imagine it. Imagine 873,250 fewer unborn human beings destroyed every year. Imagine 873,250 fewer women going through abortions. Imagine 1,060,370 fewer women having to experience unplanned pregnancy, and instead being able to bear children at a time when their age, health, and life situation are better suited for motherhood — or being free to choose a different life path than motherhood.

Earlier this month, a Republican-appointed federal judge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri rejected a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by an employer in a secular industry (mining, metals, & ceramics) who, due to his own religious beliefs, doesn’t want to provide his employees with insurance that covers contraception.

Judge Carol Jackson noted that employers already pay their employees a form of compensation that could be used to purchase contraception: their salaries. This is an argument I’ve made in the past. The full ruling is online here.

The burden of which plaintiffs complain is that funds, which plaintiffs will contribute to a group health plan, might, after a series of independent decisions by health care providers and patients covered by OIH’s plan, subsidize someone else’s participation in an activity that is condemned by plaintiffs’ religion. This Court rejects the proposition that requiring indirect financial support of a practice, from which plaintiff himself abstains according to his religious principles, constitutes a substantial burden on plaintiff’s religious exercise.

RFRA is a shield, not a sword. It protects individuals from substantial burdens on religious exercise that occur when the government coerces action one’s religion forbids, or forbids action one’s religion requires; it is not a means to force one’s religious practices upon others. RFRA does not protect against the slight burden on religious exercise that arises when one’s money circuitously flows to support the conduct of other free-exercise-wielding individuals who hold religious beliefs that differ from one’s own…

Just as in Mead, plaintiffs must contribute to a health care plan which does not align with their religious beliefs. In this case, however, the burden on plaintiffs is even more remote; the health care plan will offend plaintiffs’ religious beliefs only if an OIH employee (or covered family member) makes an independent decision to use the plan to cover counseling related to or the purchase of contraceptives. Already, OIH and Frank O’Brien pay salaries to their employees—money the employees may use to purchase contraceptives or to contribute to a religious organization. [emphasis added] By comparison,the contribution to a health care plan has no more than a de minimus impact on the plaintiff’s religious beliefs than paying salaries and other benefits to employees.

And once again, despite the claims in this and similar lawsuits that the HHS mandate forces them to cover abortifacients, the belief that emergency contraception is abortifacient has not been borne out by the evidence. I’m going to keep repeating that until new evidence comes to light or people stop making this claim, so get used to it.

Blog Posts

Why Women *Really* Use Contraception

Marysia

In countries where there is a vocal, well-funded minority against contraception, stereotypes against women who use it abound.

In the United States, for example, women who use contraceptives–the overwhelming majority of women, by the way–have been derided as feckless, irresponsible, selfish, monstrously unnatural, man-hating, child-hating sluts who want to live parasitically off hard-working, moral-paragon taxpayers, and who automatically have abortions without a thought if they become unintentionally pregnant. Women who do not use contraceptives, on the other hand, are praised as spiritually superior, virtuous, man-loving, child-loving, fruitful Good Girls who know their ordained place in G*d’s Order of Things.

What a different, and much more flattering, much more accurate picture emerges from a new Guttmacher Institute study, Reasons for Contraception: Perspectives of US Women Seeking Care at Specialized Family Planning Clinics, which is forthcoming in the journal Contraception.

From a release about the study:

“Women value the ability to plan their childbearing, and view doing so as critical to being able to achieve their life goals,” says study author Laura Lindberg. “They need continued access to a wide range of contraceptives so they can plan their families and determine when they are ready to have children.”

Few studies in the United States have asked women directly why they use contraception and what benefits they expect or have achieved from its use. To fill this gap, the authors surveyed 2,094 women receiving services at 22 family planning clinics nationwide.

The majority of participants reported that contraception has had a significant impact on their lives, allowing them to take better care of themselves or their families (63%), support themselves financially (56%), complete their education (51%), or keep or get a job (50%).

When asked why they are seeking contraceptive services now, women expressed concerns about the consequences of an unintended pregnancy on their families’ and their own lives. The single most frequently cited reason for using contraception was that women could not afford to take care of a baby at that time (65%). Nearly one in four women reported that they or their partners were unemployed, which was a very important reason for their contraceptive use. Among women with children, nearly all reported that their desire to care for their current children was a reason for contraceptive use.

Many women reported interrelated reasons for using contraception, suggesting that the complexities of women’s lives influence their decision to use contraception and their choice of method. Other reasons for using contraception, reported by a majority of respondents, include not being ready to have children (63%), feeling that using birth control gives them better control over their lives (60%) and wanting to wait until their lives are more stable to have a baby (60%).

The release also includes this commentary.

“Notably, the reasons women give for using contraception are similar to the reasons they give for seeking an abortion,” according to Lawrence B. Finer, author of a previous Guttmacher study on that topic. “This means we should see access to abortion in the broader context of women’s lives and their efforts to avoid unplanned childbearing, in light of its potential consequences for them and their families.”

What does this study mean from an All Our Lives sort of perspective? For one, it fits well with what we already know experientially about the critical reasons why women need and want access to the full range of pregnancy prevention methods. Reasons that have nothing to do with the abovementioned belittling stereotypes.

For another, any serious effort to reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions must include expanded access to the full range of methods and understanding and alleviation of any problems that might hinder their effectiveness.

We do not advocate this course because we equate contraception with abortion, let alone believe the hype about some foreordained, inevitable “contraceptive mentality.” We advocate it because it works best in the real world, honors most women’s preferences to avert rather than interrupt unintended pregnancies, and does not involve the taking of prenatal lives. In other words, it evinces the most respect for human beings and universal human rights.

For yet another–the study findings call into question the sharp division between women who use contraception and those who do not. All Our Lives has long questioned this as just another brutal variant on the sundering of womankind into Madonnas and Whores. We assert the right of all women to use/not use any particular method of pregnancy prevention in accordance with their own preferences, values, and circumstances.

Thanks, Cristina Page, for bringing the Guttmacher study to our attention.

Blog Posts

World Contraception Day 2012

Jen R

Today is World Contraception Day 2012. In recognition, I’d like to call your attention to a sample of our writings discussing the ways in which the freedom to choose whether and how to prevent conception can save and improve the lives of women and their children.

We are also participating in discussions on Twitter using the hashtags #sheparty and #WCD2012. Join us!

A Response to “Disability, Prenatal Testing, and the Case for Moral, Compassionate Abortion”: Part 1 (photo by Tom Olin)
Blog Posts

A Response to “Disability, Prenatal Testing, and the Case for Moral, Compassionate Abortion”

Meghan

RH Reality Check has published yet another article extolling abortion in the case of fetal disability. (I use the word extoll because these articles portray fetal disability as a a particularly important reason for pro choice policies. By using disability in this manner, disability-selective abortion is extolled-it is portrayed as something positive that needs to be preserved). Many of us at All Our Lives follow the site, and our own Mary Krane Derr has written articles for them in the past. Yet, we have noticed a pernicious pattern of ableism that permeates the site. By this I mean that the perspectives of the disabled community and issues facing that community are rarely acknowledged. Ablebodied perspectives dominate, and abortion is often cited as an important tool for the prevention of disability. Recently, the site published an article entitled, Disability, Prenatal Testing, and the Case for Moral, Compassionate Abortion.” Despite the editors eventual decision to allow a disability advocate to respond to this article, I feel that a sense of tokenism overshadows that decision and that further analysis is necessary.

The piece is so full of ableist preconceptions and misinformation that it is impossible to address them all in a single blog post. Therefore, I have decided to complete a series responding to the issues she addresses. In this blog post, I will explain why Sierra’s piece is condescending, ahistorical, and embraces eugenic ideas related to the continued influence of ableism in our culture. I will also consider the issue of ablebodied privilege and its influence on discussions related to ableism and selective abortion. Moreover, my approach to this issue reflects personal beliefs and experiences that not every All Our Lives board member shares. While we are united in our desire to see such abortions end, we may not all take the same approach to addressing this issue. Finally, before I begin I will briefly address the pain that parents who interrupt pregnancies impacted by a prenatal diagnosis may feel when reading a disability rights analysis of such decisions.

A Brooding Conflict

The intensely personal, private and painful nature of abortion for fetal anomaly makes this subject difficult to address. Many pregnancies terminated for reasons of fetal anomaly were wanted. These parents may feel that they did not “terminate a pregnancy,” but released their child’s spirit and/or saved him or her from a lifetime of suffering. These parents were motivated by feelings of love. Hence, it is extremely painful for these individuals to hear that their agonizing choice was at least partially influenced by ableism. Nevertheless, I do not feel that this is something disability advocates can avoid when discussing the social pressures that contribute to disability-selective abortion. As Amy Sequentia, a nonverbal autistic rights advocate notes, “We don’t hate parents but we are not going anywhere. We will continue to talk and write about the need for acceptance – ours and their children’s. Autistic children are part of the autistic community. And we will point out the flaws in the autism “advocacy” organizations – they never invite us when talking publicly about autism.” Similarly, any discussion of reproductive rights and disability is going to involve difficult discussions about ableism, and that is going to come up in reference to the painful decisions parents make to terminate wanted pregnancies. Hence, I want to invite everyone reading this to try and do so with compassion for themselves and for the moral challenges we all face as we undergo the difficult experience of being human.

Logical Inconsistency

Women have abortions for a plethora of reasons, only one of which is fetal disability. Sierra has argued that advocates’ objections to disability-selective abortion conflate fetuses with born children, yet she has chosen to specify these abortions as specifically “moral and compassionate,” a distinction which depends upon her perceptions of people who are alive right now. In order to argue that preventing someone’s birth is compassionate, one must make judgments about the experiences of people who are leading lives similar to that which the fetus is expected to lead. One must conclude that these experiences are sufficiently horrific to make not being born preferable to living that life. Hence, specifying those particular abortions as compassionate while not categorizing the moral nature of other abortions DOES send the message that people with disabilities are better off not being born. Without such judgments, the decision making process related to these abortions could not take place.

Tone:

Sierra has a profoundly condescending tone toward her audience. She begins the article by saying:

“Note: If the headline didn’t already clue you in, this is controversial subject matter. If you come away from this article thinking that I advocate genocide of a disabled population or the coercion of women pregnant with disabled fetuses into abortion, that I hate disabled people or think that Down syndrome people don’t deserve to live, you have failed to understand my point. Please walk away from the computer, breathe deeply, and start again from the beginning… if you’re already angry, please stop reading and go get yourself a nice cappuccino. Have a beautiful day. And then, if you still really want to read this, take frequent breaks to punch a pillow with a “hello, my name is Sierra” badge stuck to it.”

This statement a) trivializes legitimate objections to her argument, b) insults the maturity of those who hold such objections by suggesting that we are incapable of responding to her article in a calm manner, c) insults the intelligence of her readers. (Really, this is controversial subject matter? I totally didn’t know that: thanks for telling me!)The pseudo-levity of her remarks attempts to make righteous indignation the stuff of humor. Reading that paragraph is like being talked-down to by a preschool teacher: “Oh, honey, these issues are just too complicated for your little mind to understand. Here, have a cookie.”

Token “Support”/Ahistoricism

Sierra goes on to write, “The disability rights movement is hugely important and I support it. It’s especially vital for individuals with mental illnesses, who are often judged as “not really disabled” because there’s nothing visibly wrong with them. Disabled people have a long history of being medically abused, used as test subjects without consent, being abandoned or forced to live in squalor, and being generally reviled, disrespected and treated like freaks. We need a movement to rectify that and prevent it from ever happening again [my emphasis]. I’m glad we have one. Now. Here’s where I depart from Zylstra and other activists…” Sierra’s statement ignores the fact that the mistreatments she attributes to the past still go on today. (Perhaps her use of the term “rectify” in the present tense was meant to be an acknowledgement of this fact, however, her statement still puts the burden of social change squarely on the shoulders of the disability rights movement. It fails to acknowledge or reflect an understanding of the fact that disability rights impact everyone and, thus, should be everybody’s fight.) Moreover, her proceeding argument completely ignores the fact that these problems are caused by society, not by being disabled. If those abuses were to cease, people with disabilities could go on being disabled without their disabilities being an impediment to their well being, because the world would be a hospitable place for people of all abilities.

Sierra also seems to ascribe a disproportionate amount of historical and epistemological importance to her article. Shortly before launching into a discussion of “fetishism,” she writes, “Okay, now let’s go on (assuming you’re not already plotting my demise)…” Contrary to her rather aggrandizing conception of this essay, Sierra’s argument isn’t new. It certainly isn’t going to shock disability activists and allies into “plotting her demise.” Disabled people have always dealt with the influence of such attitudes, whether they manifested in Plato’s suggestion that the state control procreation, or the early eugenicists’ efforts to sterilize those they viewed as disabled. Statements of approval for that effort have been percolating in our collective consciousness since time began. Moreover, while Sierra may not consciously support eugenics, she is accepting the ableist ideas upon which this movement was based. Ie, the fact that Sierra doesn’t want to resurrect the original eugenics movement and force people to be sterilized or euthanized against their will has no bearing on the existence of this phenomenon. Eugenic ideas still exist because ableism does, not because people who hold those ideas are part of an evil conspiracy.

The tendency of geuninely good people to embrace ableist ideas can be seen in the plethora of respected leaders who supported the original eugenics movement. Plato, Oliver Wendel Holmes, WEB DuBois, and even Helen Keller (Pernick, 103) supported eugenic philosophies. Sierra’s argument is also not unique in contemporary discourse. Contemporary articles and statements in support of disability-selective abortion have been made by Joycelyn Elders (Freedom of Choice Act of 1989: Hearings before the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, United States Senate, One Hundred First Contress, second session on S. 1912, to protect the reproductive rights of women, and other purposes, March 27 and May 23, 1990, Reprints from the collection of the University of Michigan Library, pg. 199). Virginia Ironside, Claire Raynor, Peter Singer, Julian Savulescu, and a host of other individuals. Sierra’s argument simply isn’t the theoretical breakthrough that she seems to think it is.

Sierra attempts to distance her article from its connotations of ableism by stating: “I believe that it is possible and desirable to respect disabled people while still working to eliminate genetic disorders so that children who might have had Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis (or any other disease) have a chance to be born without them. I believe that abortion of a disabled fetus can be a compassionate choice made for morally sound reasons, and does not at all conflict with the respect due to disabled people. I am firmly pro-choice, and I believe strongly that the wellbeing of all born persons in a family is paramount before considering the needs of a fetus. My position is that fetuses are incapable of being self-aware and therefore cannot experience suffering the way born persons do. The prevention of suffering is central to my moral beliefs.”

In short, Sierra is saying, “I’m not an ableist person.” This, however, ignores the systemic phenomenon of ableism by which her view of disability is impacted. Perhaps part of Sierra’s ignorance can be attributed to the so-called “hierarchy of oppression” that hinders the discussion of ableism and pits issues of disability against those related to other minority groups. It’s likely that people who attend diversity assemblies at their schools are never told that diversity includes disability. While race, gender, religion and sexual orientation are discussed, disability is rarely, if ever, addressed. History classes ignore the disability rights movement, the murder of disabled people during the Holocaust, the original American eugenics/euthanasia movement, and other aspects of disability history. If curricula included this information, perhaps Sierra would have a better understanding of why her article reflects prejudiced attitudes. Despite Sierra’s attempt to distance “the prevention of suffering” from the oppression of disabled individuals, an examination of history reveals that this sentiment was shared by many eugenics supporters, many of whom felt sympathy for individuals who they felt were leading inferior lives. Even the US Eugenics Records Office, in their 1914 recommendations for the prevention of disability, argued:

“With euthanasia, as in the case of polygamy, an effective eugenical agency would be purchased at altogether too dear a moral price. Any individual once born should, in the opinion of the committee, be given every opportunity and aid for developing into a decent adulthood of maximum usefulness and happiness. Preventing the procreation of defectives rather than destroying them before birth, or in infancy, or in the later periods of life, must be the aim of modern eugenics.”

Like Sierra, the people who wrote this report had feelings of charity towards disabled individuals. They did not recognize a connection between their efforts to prevent such births and the oppression of disabled people. Similarly, Alexander Grahm Bell tutored many deaf people in lip reading and elocution, but his attempts to “integrate deaf people into society” were partially motivated by his desire to keep deaf couples from meeting, forming relationships, and procreating. In fact, Bell’s own words in support of mainstreaming the deaf closely mirror Sierra’s acknowledgement of the abuse disabled people have historically experienced. In 1883, Bell gave an address to the National Academy of Science in which he stated that laws forbidding the intermarriage of deaf individuals were not enough. Rather, the integration of deaf individuals and the subsequent dissolution of deaf communities was paramount. In support of this solution, Bell argued:

“Whatever the cause, it is certainly the case that adult deaf-mutes are sometimes hampered by the instinctive prejudices of hearing person with whom they desire to have business or social relations. Many persons have the idea that they are dangerous, morose, ill-tempered, etc. A deaf person is sometimes looked upon as a monstrosity to be stared at and avoided (Shapiro, 97).”

Because of his strong language in support of integration, Bell was regarded as a champion of the deaf, but his influence lead to a moratorium on the teaching of ASL. (Shapiro, 94-98). Like Sierra, Bell saw himself as a “supporter” of the disability rights movement. Looking for the cause of antipathy toward the disabled within his own ideology never occurred to him. He never physically harmed a deaf person, and he was probably fond of the deaf students he worked with. I’m sure that some of those students benefited from his instruction, but because he nurtured what seemed to him to be the self-evident belief that people were better off not being born deaf, he harmed the deaf community.

Sierra has embraced the same fallacy. It is not possible to support the elimination of something without acceding to its inherent inferiority. The belief that the prevention of disability via selective reproduction has a special moral status is eugenic thought, even if that philosophy isn’t forced unto others via legal means. One cannot be a legitimate ally and suggest that we ought not to be born as we are. That position does, in fact “conflict with the respect due to disabled people.” It strips us of our identity and boxes us into a caricature of personal tragedy.

Privileged Assumptions

In between insulting her audience and suggesting that her detractors head to the nearest Starbucks, Sierra makes huge assumptions about things that she has not experienced. She bases her assumptions about disability upon her experience of growing up in poverty. The two are simply not the same thing. While issues of class and disability certainly intersect, being an impoverished non-disabled person does not confer knowledge of what it is like to live as a disabled person of any economic background. She “wagers” that the disabled wouldn’t have chosen to be disabled, an assumption based entirely on hubris. As a person with Nonverbal Learning Disorder, I think that some of the social cues that I have difficulty picking up on are bizarre, immoral and destructive. I do not feel that being born non-disabled and growing up to accept these practices as “normal” would have benefited me. Most people I know in the disability rights and studies communities embrace their disabilities as a fundamental part of their identities that should not be changed. A colleague of mine expressed this sentiment well when he said, “Without dwarfism, there is no Joe.”

Perhaps Sierra’s tone and logical inconsistency are related to her own unacknowledged privilege. Despite Sierra’s experience of childhood poverty, she does not seem to recognize that like affluence, able-bodied-ness is a privileged status subject to social influences. Because she doesn’t realize that being able-bodied predisposes her to view that status as universally desirable, she assumes that all disabled people want to be able-bodied like her. She locates the problem of disability oppression within disabled bodies themselves rather than in the attitudes of our society. (Moreover, despite her comparison of disability to the poverty she experienced, I don’t see her using that circumstance to defend “moral and compassionate” abortion for would-be indigent fetuses…)

The same issue of privilege impacts conversations about ableism and selective abortion. Most people defending such abortions have had the privilege of assuming that able-bodied-ness is the state against which the experience of embodiment will be measured. Telling these people that able-bodied and disabled are social constructs conflicts with everything they have been taught to believe. Moreover, like racism, people tend to define ableism as a personality flaw rather than a systemic phenomenon that drives oppression. Alan B. Johnson expresses this difference succinctly in Privilege, Power and Difference when he writes: “Racist isn’t another word for ‘bad white people,’ just as patriarchy isn’t a bit of nasty code for ‘men.’ Oppression and dominance name social realities that we can participate in without being oppressive or dominating people (Johnson, 10).” This is also true of ableism. It’s not that Sierra, the editors of RH Reality Check, or parents who terminate pregnancies impacted by disability are bad people, but they are impacted by an oppressive system that defines able-bodiedness as the norm and encourages the elimination of characteristics that deviate from that state (disability). Hence, it is possible for them to behave according to ableist preconceptions without harboring malice toward disabled individuals. This is something that Sierrra fails to recognize.

As shown in the comment section, the author of the original article has written a response to my critique. It can be found here.