Sister Artemis

Category: Abortion

  • Divided sentiments: Thoughts for a 2022 Independence Day

    Over on Wonkette, folks are talking about their plans for the day, and how after the Dobbs decision on Roe v Wade, they aren’t celebrating, or are celebrating differently. One said:

    I ain’t feeling it today. Ask the uterus-havers in your vicinity how free they’re feeling these days.

    I thought about it for a bit before choosing to reply. In about an hour, I’m heading out to socialize with some new acquaintances and watch a small parade from their front yard. And I won’t be the debbie-downer at their gathering. But still it’s mixed. So I replied:

    Speaking as a uterus haver, though not a particularly productive one anymore, I’m split on all this. On the one hand, a pit of red-hot fury is rumbling at my core 24/7. On the other hand, the ideals of liberty still move me, like they’ve moved people for hundreds of years now.

    So, today I stand with a foot in each camp, resolute in my fury, and committed to moving forward as much as I am able, and as much as I’m able to help others, attain their independence and self-determination.

    It’s a big day in one of the little towns I live between, probably our biggest tourism day of the entire year. I’m going to focus on what I want for myself and my fellow citizens, watch our itsy bitsy parade (which is very queer-positive, so that helps), eat some hotdogs, hang with friends, and stand strong for the fight we are all facing. It’s the only way I know how to do this without melting into that pit of fury.

    I feel so grim. I’ve felt this way since Trump won, but even then, it wasn’t a new feeling. Awful, awful things happen in our world all the goddam time, and I’m powerless to stop almost all of it. What I can do is keep the faith, tell the truth, stand by those near me. So that’s what I do, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I can.

    And at least there’s this, the whacky, wonderful Yachats La De Da parade (2014)

  • Choice

    I chose abortion. In 1978, I was pregnant, didn’t want to be, and chose abortion.

    Group Health Cooperative was my insurer, and they covered much of the procedure. I was 19 years old. And there weren’t many obstacles. My abortion-adverse boyfriend wouldn’t help pay my share of the cost, but he promised to be there for me when it was done, and he kept that promise – tea, pampering, warmth, kindness. It was odd, but a mostly-tolerable anti-abortion attitude, and he certainly didn’t try to keep me from going through with the abortion.

    Having health insurance most definitely helped; I was part of a network of services. Admittedly, I had to go to Seattle twice, once for a pre-procedure appointment, and then again for the a abortion itself. And I had to go to the local GHC clinic to have a laminaria inserted. The older man who inserted the laminaria was friendly and kind, and gentle, and perfectly comfortable telling me why they wanted me to have the thin, dried up, sterile piece of seaweed inserted in my cervix, to soak up the natural liquids in my vagina, swell the thing, and help open my cervix for the next day’s procedure. He told me how old the use of laminaria was (old, though I don’t remember how old anymore), how trusted it was.

    My mother drove me to Seattle the next day – an hour’s drive, and my mother was nervous but supportive, and the clinic workers were practical, kind, efficient. I didn’t see the doctor until just before the abortion, but I’d met with her the week before. They did some physical testing at that first appointment – heart rate, weight, general health screening – but the bulk of that appointment was spent in talking: how an abortion works, what to expect, gentle questioning about who’s choice this abortion was (mine? another person?). They were careful, respectful, informative.

    The abortion appointment next week took longer, but was also respectful, easy, supportive of what I was choosing. The procedure itself was quick, the nurse and doctor happy to tell me what they were doing and why, and it didn’t hurt much. I waited afterwards in a semi-dark room with other women, all of us quiet, none of us seemingly in deep trauma or regret.

    My mother waited patiently in the room by the front desk, took me to lunch afterwards, asked careful and non-invasive questions just in case I wanted to talk about it. I did want to talk about it. She listened patiently and attentively to everything I had to say.

    As promised, my boyfriend was waiting when I got home, ready to take care of me, fetch me comfort food, and blankets, and kittens, and smoke. No guilt, no drama. I felt empowered by the abortion: I had made a decision about the trajectory I wanted my life to take, and acted on that decision.

    This is how abortion access should be.

    And now, as of today, this is how it can not be, for far too many women, in far too many states.

    It will take a long time, but we must, MUST change this.

  • Why Sex Ed In School Matters

    When Todd Akin first scoffed at the notion that rape victims can get pregnant, he defended himself by pointing to the medical judgment of someone named Dr. John Willke, former president of the National Right to Life Committee, who has been pushing this argument for many years.

    Indeed, just this week, Willke told the New York Times rapists don’t impregnate their victims because, “This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight. She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”

    via Romney and Mr. ‘Spastic Tubes’ – The Maddow Blog.

    [Insert BIG HEAD-SLAP here]

    Ohhhh…kaaaaay….. so does Mr Spastic Tubes (love it!) think human women pop out an egg when we have “legitimate” sex? And how big does he think a little sperm is, that our “tight tubes” could keep them out? Or does he have that Fallopian tube and vagina thing mixed up? Is it possible he has never actually investigated the arrangement of the female pelvis?

    This is why we can’t have nice things. Or even shabby functional things.

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates on Todd Akin’s nutjob rape comments, plus me on TNC’s comments (or “that’s blogging!”)

    Ta-Nehisi Coates put out a short and thoughtful post on Senate candidate Todd Akin’s comments on how women magically destroy sperm during “legitimate rape” (vs. ???) – and TNC nails the attitude that makes trying to have logical discussions with these folks nigh to impossible:

    At any rate, I think what’s interesting here is the assumed power. I have the right to objectively define pregnancy from rape as rare. I have the right to determine separate legitimate rape from all those instances when you were in need of encouragement, wearing a red dress or otherwise asking for it. I have the right to manufacture scientific theories about your body — theories which reinforce my power. If the body doesn’t “shut that whole thing down” then clearly you weren’t raped, and there’s no need to talk about an abortion. And even if I am wrong on every count, I still have the right to dictate the terms of your body and the remaining days of your life.

    via Rape, Abortion, and the Privilege of Magical Thinking – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic.

    TNC writes about his own response to this redefining of rape, and how it relates to the use of abortion:

    Whatever qualms I have about abortion (and increasingly I think it isn’t even my right to have qualms) the idea of putting medicine in the hands of people who think that, in the instance of rape, the female body can “shut that whole thing down” or “secrete a certain secretion” to prevent pregnancy is utterly terrifying. [emphasis mine]

    Couldn’t agree more, even while possessing a difference experience than TNC.
    And about what I bolded in that quote: Mr. Coates, you ABSOLUTELY have every right to feel qualms. You probably can’t even stop those feelings if they crop up – you can counter them, test them, explore them, but you can’t very well stop that kind of thing.

    But you can refrain from imposing rule, regulation and condemnation based on those qualms. And that’s a major difference.

  • Violence against ideas

    19 September 2009

    I was so irritated at Randall Terry.  My disgust at his technique and his use of James Pouillon’s death for his own propaganda campaign spurred me to write and post on Terry’s actions, before setting down my thoughts on the murder itself.

    When I heard about the murder (or most probably read it somewhere online), I stopped in my tracks, teared up, went digging for information with a very heavy heart.  Murder is tragic, regardless of politics or passions surrounding the victim.

    Searching for information on an event which is both remote and striking did help me process my sorrow.  It also deepened the sorrow and painted a limited picture of the situation.

    I imagine Pouillon was the type of elderly, hard line anti-abortion protester I’ve seen many times on the sidewalks outside clinics, and not a person I would want to discuss abortion with in any form.  Usually nice folks, just not folks I agree with. I sincerely wish he and others wouldn’t hold up gruesome signs and draw such deep lines in the sand.  But this is no justification for murder.  His killer is rightly being held and presumably will be incarcerated for the murder.

    Without knowing why Pouillon was targeted by Harlan Drake, it is hard to know where Pouillon’s anti-abortion stance figures into the reasons for the murder.  But it gets me thinking, following tangents that don’t specifically have to do with this particular murder, but spin off the speculation around it.

    I asked myself whether someone on the pro-choice side had finally reacted in kind to the murder of abortion providers, arson, intimidation and violent rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement.  And that thought scared me.  All of the years I’ve been following or involved in women’s reproductive rights (a much broader field than just abortion), the left has never struck back in kind.  Pro-choice activists, however extreme, haven’t stalked and killed people in the anti-abortion movement, haven’t fire-bombed their offices, or harassed their co-workers, friends and family with pictures of women dead from botched, illegal abortions, in an effort to get anti-choicers to stop their activism.

    I believe it’s the responsibility of (dare I say it) good citizens to engage in civil debate, and not solve their problems by, oh, for example, killing people they disagree with.  Of course, there are folks on the extremes of both right and left who can’t quite wrap their minds around that concept, but I’ve seen a lot less of it on the left.  Not none, but considerably less. 

    The extreme left is not at war with society in the same way that the extreme right is.  That, again, goes back to the Frank Schaeffer post I wrote about the other day.  The aim of the left, even the extreme left, is to create a harmonious society which works to the benefit of all citizens.  It gets crazy when you look at totalitarian systems on the left (think Mao), but most of the left is not interested in tyranny, but rather pluralism, a flexible society.  The presumption is on bringing together the diverse strains, not eliminating them.  The aim of the right is… well, it takes various forms, but getting everybody on the same page – religiously, politically – looks to be at the heart of it.  The extreme right-wing, the religious far-right, proudly states their aim to remake the United States as a “Christian Nation” and not just any ol’ Christian nation either.  The adherents of this view promote a very specific type of Christianity, one in which most progressive Christians and often Catholics, have no place and are actually considered agents of Satan.

    Suffice it to say that in my view the left permits a larger diversity of opinion within its vision of a good strong America, and the right prefers to see a closing of the ranks.  In the middle, the more moderate left and right simply pushes and pulls at each other, progressive America pulling us forward in response to changes in our society, conservative America pulling back in worry that changes will come too fast, too hard, too recklessly.  If politics is a spectrum, good sane policy is founded in the middle (moderates, centrists), the factions just left and right of center do their jobs of promoting change and urging caution, and the fringes on either end yammer away, usually ineffectually but occasionally stirring either critical thinking (yeah!) or crazy hysteria (boo!).

    These days, to the extent the fringes of the spectrum are pretty extreme, it is much more extreme on the right hand side.

    The extreme left has targeted the physical, the properties of what it doesn’t like: buildings, logging equipment, SUVs.  People have been harmed in the process, but haven’t generally been the actual target, and the extreme left generally doesn’t promote or condone murder of its opposition.  The extreme right has also targeted buildings and equipment, but have specifically advocated and sometimes practiced violence against particular people, targeting clinic doctors and escorts, and ultimately killing some of them.  Rhetoric condoning the killing of abortion doctors is an example of how this violence is sanctioned on the extreme right.  The left and right approaches (property vs. property and people) seem to me to be two different versions of reprehensible and terrible actions – but the degree to which the differ speaks to something really disturbing.  I don’t sanction the violence of the extreme left, but the violence on the extreme right scares me even more.

    And back to Mr. Pouillon, a victim of his murderer. 

    I don’t know if Drake killed Pouillon because he disagreed with him about abortion, or didn’t think he should hold signs up, or because Mr. Pouillon just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  What I do know is that someone is dead because his killer couldn’t figure out a better way to deal with his anger or frustration or whatever it was that drove him to pick up a gun and start firing.  And, I don’t know which is scarier – that Pouillon died because of his beliefs, or that Pouillon died as a random target of a raging man with a weapon in his hands.

    I’d like to think that this kind of violence will someday be a thing of the past.  But I doubt very much that will ever be true, and certainly not in my lifetime.