In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Pregnancy

Bodily Autonomy:Jehovah’s Witness Teens and Blood Transfusions

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about bodily autonomy. It seems to me that when feminists discuss this issue it is usually with regards to reproductive justice. However, I’ve got something different in mind right now and I’m hoping that others could give me some input on it.

As a member of disability culture, I have witnessed how those within my community are particularly susceptible to having our wishes ignored even when we are able to express ourselves quite clearly. I’m not just referring to those situations that happen during our day to day lives. It’s really aggravating to hear about how often non-disabled people feel free to just grab someone’s wheelchair and move it without even asking for permission from the person sitting in the chair. Things much worse than this occur inside of hospitals all the time. Medical professionals sometimes exhibit the same ablism I’ve witnessed in public. Given this environment, I’m loathe to say that doctors should be given permission to over-ride a patient’s stated will. However, I am beginning to think that my view may need to be reassessed.

When it comes to abortion, my feeling is that teenagers want them should be able to have them. I don’t think we need the state deciding whether or not a person should continue a pregnancy. For me, it’s really cut and dry. However, should this apply to all medical decisions that a teenager wants to make?

Read More…Read More…

The Link Between Teen Pregnancy and Sexual Violence

Ashley at SAFER recently linked to a fascinating piece on teen pregnancy by The Center for American Progress. It’s one that I think everyone ought to read, because it so clearly illustrates the connection between sexual violence and “traditional” reproductive rights issues. I’ve always felt that sexual violence is undoubtedly a reproductive justice issue, as it concerns a woman’s right and ability to make choices about her sexuality and her body. But here’s an even more tangible reason why sexual violence and the choice when and if to have a child are inextricably connected. (all links from original piece)

Teen pregnancy isn’t simply about girls and boys being promiscuous, or lacking access to sex education or contraception. Too often teen pregnancy is about girls losing agency over their bodies because of the unbearable injuries of being sexually violated.

Underneath the discourse about the educational strategies needed to prevent teen pregnancy lies a much harder and complex issue: Violence in girls’ lives leaves them at risk for teen pregnancy—especially for girls of color.

A significant correlation exists between childhood sexual abuse and teen pregnancy. An estimated 60 percent of teen girls’ first pregnancies are preceded by experiences of molestation, rape, or attempted rape. In one study, between 30 and 44 percent of teen mothers were victims of rape or attempted rape. Up to 20 percent of girls become pregnant as the direct result of rape.*

The Harvard School of Public Health’s exhaustive research on the lives of girls demonstrates that girls who are victims of violence from dating partners are four to six times more likely than non-abused girls to become pregnant, and eight to nine times more likely to attempt suicide.

Other research findings compare sexually abused pregnant teens to pregnant teens who have not suffered sexual abuse. The sexually abused girls initiated intercourse a year earlier than their peers and engaged in a wide variety of high-risk behaviors, including substance abuse. The average age of first intercourse for abused girls is 13.8, in contrast to the national average of 16.2. Only 28 percent of the abused girls used birth control at first intercourse, compared to 74 percent of girls in the general population.

I’m a person who has long believed that sex education should actually be about sex rather than just about contraception, and that discussions of consent and sexual violence prevention education — and I mean real prevention education, not “watch your drink” — need to be a part of that. But I still hadn’t considered such a strong cause and effect relationship between the two until now . . . and it certainly makes me think about that high rate of teen pregnancy at my high school from a whole new angle.

Read More…Read More…

Bush Administration Promotes Discriminatory Practices Related To Birth Control

From the New York Times:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control. […]

The proposal, which circulated in the department on Monday, says the new requirement is needed to ensure that federal money does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or policies in violation of federal law.” The administration said Congress had passed a number of laws to ensure that doctors, hospitals and health plans would not be forced to perform abortions.

This reference to not supporting coercive or discriminatory practices is interesting since the proposed change would explicitly allow medical providers to morally coerce patients and to discriminate against girls and women who want or need a service or a prescription which they are allowed to have by law.

I don’t believe the Bush administration truly believes in their rationale for this proposed change. If they did then employment rules would apply to all areas where people don’t want to perform certain tasks for moral reasons.

Think about the government contractors who have faced allegations of taking actions which show no respect for human life.

Read More…Read More…

The Latest in Stupid Laws You Probably Didn’t Know About: HIV Criminalization

Recently at The Center for HIV Law and Policy, we’ve been helping out with this case, in which a woman is facing jail time for exposing her husband to HIV.

The woman being charged faces up to 10 years in prison. Her husband has also gotten a restraining order against her, and she has been unable to see her four-year-old son, on the grounds that she will somehow transmit HIV to him. The criminal charges pending against her will make it harder for her to receive custody.

We don’t yet know all of the facts of the case. We know what her husband is alleging (but people say a lot of things when divorce proceedings get underway). We know that her version of events is different. Perhaps more importantly, we know that she is black and her husband is white. We also know that she doesn’t come from money, and he has more resources. I can’t help but think that the zealousness with which the District Attorney is pursuing this case might have something to do with those facts.

The criminalization of HIV has been an ongoing issue since the 80s. For as long as people have been talking about locking everyone with the disease up and suggesting that HIV+ people be branded with a tattoo, there have been efforts to punish punish punish anyone with HIV, particularly if they dare to have sex.

Read More…Read More…

Justice for Regina McKnight

Regina McKnight
Regina McKnight at her post conviction hearing

Great news: Regina McKnight, a South Carolina woman who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for homicide by child abuse after she gave birth to a still-born baby, has had her conviction overturned.

McKnight is one of about 200 women who have been arrested for the crime of using drugs while pregnant. The women who are brought to trial are usually charged with either child abuse or drug trafficking — the “trafficking” act happening in utero. This is an issue of particular interest to me, and I’m tempted to write a long post about it, but a final paper calls. So, check out these old posts for background:

Help Pregnant Drug Addicts, Don’t Jail Them
Prosecuting Neo-Natal Drug Use: A Public Health Issue
Prosecuting Pregnant Drug-Addicted Mothers

And I would be remiss not to mention the fantastic work of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, who have worked tirelessly to put this issue in the spotlight. Check out this piece in particular about Ms. McKnight’s ordeal.

Illinois Court Rules Against Forced-Sterilization of Disabled Woman

Good news:

Disability rights advocates and medical ethicists praised a precedent-setting ruling Friday by the Illinois Appellate Court denying a bid to sterilize a mentally disabled woman against her will.

The woman, identified only as K.E.J. in court records, isn’t capable of raising a child on her own, but her guardian failed to prove that sterilization would be in her best interests, a three-judge panel in Chicago ruled unanimously.

[ . . . ]

The ruling was the first appellate opinion on the issue in Illinois.

 

“It’s extraordinarily significant” because it guarantees the disabled a court hearing, said Katie Watson, a Northwestern University professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of about two dozen medical ethicists.

[ . . . ]

K.E.J., 29, suffered a brain injury as a child when she was struck by a car. As a result, she cannot be left alone to operate a stove or perform most household chores.

The woman lives with her aunt, who was appointed as her guardian in the mid-1990s. In 2003, the aunt filed a “petition for tubal ligation” in Cook County Probate Court, arguing that her niece had a bad medical reaction to other birth-control methods.

At a bench trial in 2005, K.E.J. testified that she hoped one day to have children. “I will love taking care of them,” she said. “I will love, you know, to see how they grow.”

Seeing our atrocious history on forced sterilization in this country, I’d say that this ruling is oh, several decades overdue. I personally found both Pregnancy and Power and Killing the Black Body to be excellent primers on this subject as well as great books (but I’m sure that there are other great books I haven’t read that focus primarily on this issue — if you know them, leave the titles in the comments). But the simple version of the facts is that for many decades, America participated in and promoted forced sterilization of those who were deemed unfit to pass on their genes. That included women of color, the poor and those who were referred to as “feeble-minded” — disabled women (the phrase was also used to justify sterilization of other socially-scorned women, like those who were promiscuous or sex workers). Many people believe that this is still happening, like with the Norplant situation several years back (also covered in Killing the Black body), and there is more or less undeniable evidence that it is still happening to non-English-speaking women and the disabled.

We often treat disabled people as though they are undeserving of certain things in life, and sexuality and parenthood are pretty high up on that list. I do not think that being unable to raise your children on your own makes you unworthy of giving birth to and raising children. And I certainly don’t see any justification for a forced-sterilization of a woman who has made it clear that her wishes are otherwise; we need to see it as equally heinous to forced-birth and forced-abortion. By it’s very nature, a fundamental right is not conditional, and believing in reproductive justice means believing in it for all. And so I applaud the court and congratulate disability activists on this win; I can only hope that the success continues.

via FRIDA

Abortion as art

Woah.

For once, I am at a loss for words.

UPDATE:Yale says it is “performance art”:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.


UPDATE 2: The artist speaks out, and she has some really interesting things to say:

This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood.

Emphasis mine.

Whether she actually did the insemination/period inducement regime or not (she says she did, Yale administrators say she didn’t), she does certainly make the point that naming things shapes reality; no one actually knows if she had abortions, but the story nonetheless revolves around that “fact.” Do read her whole op/ed.

Mother May I?

Who remembers the 2005 and 2006 California propositions that tried to instate parental notification rules for minors seeking abortions? You know, the ones that failed? Well, not so fast. Looks like it’s probably going to be on the ballot this year, too. Meet the man you can thank:

Jim Holman, owner of the San Diego Reader, has spent millions trying to persuade Californians to pass a law requiring parents to be notified before their underage daughter has an abortion.

After two failed ballot measure campaigns, Holman said last year that he didn’t want to try again.

But when other anti-abortion advocates, including winemaker Don Sebastiani, launched a third campaign, Holman couldn’t resist opening up his checkbook once again.

“Sebastiani was not deterred. He said, ‘We have to go back again and again,’ ” Holman said. “He led with big donations and I sort of followed.”

The result could make California political history.

The $1.8 million donated by Holman and Sebastiani so far is likely to put a parental-notification initiative before voters for the third time in four years. The measure would require a physician to notify a parent or guardian 48 hours before performing an abortion for a girl under the age of 18.

If the measure qualifies, it would be the first time since the California initiative process was established in 1914 that the state’s voters will consider the same measure so many times in a four-year period.

Planned Parenthood is arguing that Holman, while not doing anything illegal, is abusing the electoral process, and I agree. No, money alone does not get an initiative on a ballot, but if you spend $1.8 on an issue that inspires the kind of passion abortion does and don’t manage to get the just-under 700,000 signatures needed in a very large state, you’d have to be pretty damn inept. Holman is, of course, perfectly within his rights — that doesn’t mean there’s nothing unethical about it.

Read More…Read More…