Category: General

Employers can refuse to provide coverage for contraception on moral as well as religious grounds.

My reaction to this is slightly more complex than it might be normally. I certainly am in favor of demystifying and debunking the idea that religious beliefs have a special centrality and fervency and we atheists simply can’t imagine as we go about our stolid, prosaic, immoral lives.

However.

I’m in favor of doing that not by elevating every moral belief one might have to the protected status that articles of faith currently hold, but by holding the devout to the same standards the rest of us have to meet. And I still find it absurd to say that companies, or even not-for-profits can hold moral or religious beliefs. They’re not human entities. They don’t have consciousness. They don’t have rights. The end. I find it almost as absurd as I find this quotation:

[The group] opposes methods of contraception that it says can amount to abortion, including hormonal products, intrauterine devices and emergency contraceptives. Many scientists disagree that those methods of contraception are equivalent to abortion.

One of these groups is qualified to make statements about how contraception works. One of these groups’ positions is, therefore, correct. The NYT bending over backwards to avoid making a fact-based assertion–and the courts’ refusal to take actual facts into account–is deeply disturbing to me. Contraception does not cause abortion. Vaccines do not cause autism. The world is not flat. There are such things as facts.

And when a humanities professor has to make that point, you know we’re in deep shit.

I found this article, about how natural disasters, and therefore climate change, have significantly greater negative effects on women fascinating. (The article is from March–I have a backlog of stuff I bookmarked to blog about. Most of it does not necessarily seem interesting enough to resurrect several months later, but this piece did to me.)

The statistics are startling. According to the article,

natural disasters on average kill more women than men — 90 percent female fatalities in some cases, prevent girls from going to school, increase the threat of sexual assault.

The article lists numerous reasons for this upsetting disparity: men are more likely to own cell phones, so women are less likely to receive early alerts; girls rather than boys are in charge of fetching fresh water, often at the expense of their schooling and/or safety; women are less likely to be able to swim or climb trees. And natural disasters increase the rate at which girls are married off as well. The article also suggests ways of helping women and girls, some so staggeringly obvious that I’m gobsmacked that they had to be developed rather than be default: asking women and girls what they need/want, for instance, and providing gender-segregated restrooms in shelters so women feel safe going there.

The article made me wonder if the same dynamic was present in, say, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the US.

Surprise, it was. According to this piece, the recovery period showed that rates of violence against women quadrupled in the wake of the hurricane, and due to women’s mobility being limited by childbirth, responsibility for children and elderly relatives, and by making up a higher proportion of the elderly themselves, women are significantly more vulnerable during disaster in the US as well. I also found reviews of this book, told by the women who survived the hurricane themselves and highlighting gendered components of their experiences.

So, it seems that in multiple locations around the world, natural disasters, far from making us all equal, exacerbate existing inequalities. I wish I could be surprise.

Let me make this perfectly clear:

I just went through a pregnancy for a much-wanted child. I endured morning sickness that lasted throughout the entire pregnancy. I became so short of breath that I had to stop and rest partway up the stairs in my own home. I dislocated a rib. My heartburn was so bad that I had to take two or three separate medications each day. I had a major placental abruption with a level of blood loss that the doctors termed “impressive,” and placental abruption carries risk to both mother and fetus. And if I want to go through that, that is my decision. And if I decide not to go through with that ever again, no matter what my reason is, that is also my decision.

And my reasons for it are no legislature’s business. Whether or not anybody else thinks it’s a good reason. If someone chooses to have an abortion because of the fetus’s sex, race, disability status–not anybody else’s business.

So how does the Ohio legislature plan to enforce its bill prohibiting abortion due to a fetus having Down’s syndrome? Do they plan to bug doctors’ offices? How would any policeman know what a given woman’s reasons for abortion are? Particularly given that the blood test that can tell you whether your fetus has trisomy-18 or Down’s Syndrome (trisomy 21) is done at nine weeks. That’s quite early. Women have abortions that early for any number of reasons. This is a symbolic bill, and what it symbolizes is that the conversations pregnant people have with our doctors are not private, are not ours. It symbolizes that our decisions are never free from the judgment of others. We are never trusted to make our own decisions about child-bearing. But they are our decisions, and our motivations are between us and those we choose to consult. Forced-birthers using disability rights advocacy as a cat’s paw to muddy the issue doesn’t change that.