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

Why strip? Because it’s good for your blog!

OK, I will probably go see Juno and I’ll probably like it. The title character is apparently one of the smartest, funniest, pluckiest female protagonists in a while: a 16-year-old who’s dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, initially goes to have an abortion, then ends up deciding to carry the pregnancy to term, with a nice couple she finds as adoptive parents. (More about that aspect of it later.) It’s been described as a whip-smart, witty indie comedy, like Little Miss Sunshine but less disturbing, like Knocked Up could have been if it weren’t so intensely dude-focused without much insight into the female characters.

The fact that Juno has a strong, nuanced female lead shouldn’t be entirely surprising, because the film was written by a womna: Diablo Cody, an up-and-coming screenwriter who’s been getting a fair amount of attention in the reviews. I feel like I ought to be excited by this. There aren’t enough women writing screenplays that get made into films, and writers don’t get enough attention as it is. Is it awful that I find Diablo Cody deeply, deeply irritating? At least in this interview?

It’s not every day that you sit down with a fiery femme filmmaker who’s got a tattoo of a pinup girl on her right shoulder, but that’s just what young Juno bad girl screenwriter brought to the interview table today.

With a crown of choppy black goth hair as the ultimate anti-‘do, and a surgical glove on her right hand that she wore for no particular reason except to snap it on her wrist every now and then for emphasis of some wacky idea or another, Diablo talked about, among other eye openers, Catholic guilt, not giving a lap dance to Steven Spielberg, her former strangely liberating gig as the worst stripper and phone sex worker, and how cyberspace made her do it, don’t ask.

Why did you get into stripping?

DIABLO CODY: Blogging led me to stripping. I was at a point where I didn’t have much to say on my blog. So I stripped for one night, and it was supposed to be a fun thing to do. But I wrote about it, and people responded right away. It got me to thinking, this could be good for the blog.

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Baby Bribes

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I’m a little thrown by this article about “push presents” — gifts given to new moms from their partners as a reward for birthing a baby. There’s nothing wrong with giving your partner a gift, especially after she’s just been through a trying ordeal. There’s nothing wrong with thinking it’s really nice that your partner bought you a present after you just lived through an experience that, as one woman describes, “redefines the meaning of pain.”

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Help Pregnant Drug-Addicts, Don’t Jail Them

A while back I wrote about Theresa Hernandez, one of many women in this country who has been prosecuted for neo-natal drug use. After a four-year ordeal, throughout which Hernandez was unable to see her children and understandably fearful of receiving a life sentence, she accepted a deal to plead guilty to second-degree murder.

Theresa Hernandez was a drug addict. She was also pregnant. Because she occupied those same statuses simultaneously, she is now being called a murderer — and she’s going to jail for it. She’s going to jail despite the fact that “crack babies” are a myth. [Thanks to Nancy for that link].

But her story doesn’t end there: National Advocates for Pregnant Women are using her ordeal to raise awareness about these prosecutions. On Dec. 21st, they’re trying to pack the courtroom with activists and advocates. If you’re in or around Oklahoma City, try to stop by.

No one likes the idea of pregnant women using drugs. But prosecuting them is not only an affront to due process and equal protection rights, it’s also really, really bad public policy: If pregnant women know that their status as a drug addict will get them sent to jail, then they aren’t going to seek help. They aren’t going to seek the pre-natal care that has a far greater effect on fetal development than drug use. Prosecuting them has absolutely no benefit to anyone involved.

Here is more background on the myriad reasons these prosecutions are problematic and unjust.

Forced Miscarriage = Murder?

I’ve been musing over this one for a little while and I’m eager to hear what you think. Recently, a Texas Court ruled that a fetus can be murdered, but not by abortion.

Texas laws allow the killing of a fetus to be prosecuted as murder, regardless of the stage of development, but the laws do not apply to abortions, the state’s highest criminal court has ruled.

The Court of Criminal Appeals announced the ruling Wednesday, rejecting an appeal by Terence Lawrence, who said his right to due process was violated when he was prosecuted for two murders in the killings of a woman and her 4- to 6-week-old fetus.

The court ruled unanimously that state laws declaring a fetus an individual with protections do not conflict with the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade that women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Now, I have made my feelings on sentences for the killing of fetuses very clear in the past. In this case, I’m very glad that the court ruled that violently causing the miscarriage of a pregnancy is different from abortion. It is different. But murder?

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Two Words: Shut Up.

This article, and the comments in response, make me want to throw something. The (white, male) author bemoans the frequency of teen pregnancy amongst the low-income, mostly non-white girls he teaches. He writes:

It happens too often. A female student approaches my desk, says “Mr. Okun?”, and and whispers the two words no adult wants to hear from a teenager: “I’m pregnant.” I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to shake her with anger. What have you done? Life is not hard enough already? Is it over, have you given up? What about finishing high school? What about college? What about your own dreams? What about enjoying the last of your own childhood? How can you parent a child when you are just a child yourself? How will you support your baby, how will you support yourself? Where is the man, will he be here next year? Will I see you and your baby coldly waiting alone for a city bus that will not come? Please look me in the eye and tell me you know what you have done.

Yes, those dumb low-income teenagers have never, ever considered the consequences of getting pregnant, and they desperately need a white dude to berate them. And it gets worse, from the very first comment:

This happens to black girl teenagers everywhere and abortion is not used often enough… [insert story of author’s own abortion] … Join me in funding abortions for black teenagers.

Other commenters discuss how they don’t “believe” in abortion, which is funny since they follow up by railing against it. Most of them emphasize that adoption is the best option.

Now, I’m all about access and funding for all reproductive choices, including abortion, contraception, pre-natal care, adoption, and well-baby services. But I think we’ve done enough to coerce women of color into compromising their reproductive rights, while encouraging middle- and upper-class white women to “out-breed” them by having as many babies as possible.

Contraception, abortion, adoption and sexual health education are all important. But we need to look at why we think young women shouldn’t be having babies, and make sure that those reasons are accessible in every community. The “if you have a baby you don’t be able to go to college” argument doesn’t hold much water if the pregnant girl was never considering college in the first place. For a lot of low-income young women, getting pregnant and having a baby is a perfectly rational decision: It secures her health care, independence, and social status. If her life plans include working at a low-skilled low-wage job and having children, it makes sense to have those children early. When young women lack options, there are few negative costs to giving birth early.

How we deal with the “problem” of teen pregnancy largely depends on how we view and frame the issue in the first place. If what we’re bothered by is young, low-income women of color having babies and becoming social drains,* then it makes sense to promote abstinence, contraception and abortion; cut off welfare funding; poo-poo teen pregnancy; and generally ignore the problem. If what we’re bothered by are the lack of options facing young, low-income women — and particularly low-income women of color — and we recognize that early pregnancy is often a logical consequence of those limited options, and that the negative “consequences” of pregnancy can be mitigated, then it makes more sense to take a holistic view of social and reproductive justice.

Commentators often link teen pregnancy with a variety of social ills — poverty, high-school drop-out rates, crime, and on and on. But tying all of these problems to teen pregnancy and single-mother families seems short-sighted. There’s no question that it’s difficult to be a pregnant girl or a single parent and still be able to finish school or hold down a full-time job. But a correlation between early pregnancy and poverty does not mean that early pregnancy causes poverty. We should be concerned for women and girls in their own right, and we should fight poverty because we don’t want people to be impoverished — not because poverty is only bad for babies. We should fight the cycle of poverty by attacking the myriad and interconnected root causes, by promoting social justice for all people, and by strengthening our social safety net, not by blaming the victim and attacking the most vulnerable groups.

We can decrease the early pregnancy rate by giving young women options beyond what they have right now, by embracing a holistic vision of physical and spiritual health, and by giving them the tools to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We can mitigate the negative effects of pregnancy by making sure that every woman, regardless of her physical condition or her parental status, has full access to health care, to education, to employment, and to the resources she needs to provide for herself and her family. And we can quit lecturing and shaming young women as if finger-wagging will do anything at all to improve their situation — you know, the one we supposedly care so very much about.

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*Obviously not my view nor my terminology

Bad Ass Women’s Activist of the Week: Gutsy Abortion Provider Edition

The Bad Ass Women’s Activist of the Week is a semi-regular segment that I do over at The Curvature whenever I come across a really kick ass person who deserves some praise and recognition. With all of the bad news out there in the feminist blogosphere, I figure that news about the people who are doing good things is much needed.

This week, the bad ass activist is Rebecca Gomperts. She’s the founder of the amazing Women on Waves organization. [Warning: I’m not nuts about the tactic of showing the bodies of women who have died from illegal abortions. If you don’t want to see such an image, do not go to their “facts” page]. Many of you have probably heard of them already, but for those who haven’t, Women on Waves is a Dutch group that charters a boat into the international waters outside of countries where abortion is illegal and provides them safely (and legally) to women in need. Which, if you ask me, is really fucking cool.

The Guardian has a really great profile of Gomperts this week, and so I thought that it would be a great time to celebrate WoW’s accomplishments.

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“Too young, too pregnant”

I’m not sure how one gets to be too pregnant, but that should give you some idea as to how ridiculous parts of this article are.

It’s about the high teen birth rate in Texas (#1 in the nation, baby), and is unfortunately full of skewed statistics and flat-out untruths. Parts of it are actually not too bad, but overall it’s a frustrating read. The reporter points out that abstinence-only education doesn’t work, but still seems to accept that it’s a good idea — even when he quotes idiotic points like this one:

Conner is not convinced access to contraception in the schools is a good idea, either. “We don’t want to send a mixed message,”  she said. She noted that  a mixed message would be “don’t have sex, but if you do, use a condom.” 

Kind of like saying, “Don’t drink, but if you do, have a designated driver”?

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Want to live a longer life? Don’t be pregnant in America

Sarah Blustein’s got the reasons why, especially if you’re a woman of color:

Good news! if you are an ordinary mortal living in the United States, your chances of staying alive are better than ever. According to new government numbers, the rate of Americans dying in 2004 (the most recent year to be calculated) hit a record low, while life expectancy — for blacks and whites, men and women — hit a record high. Men were closing their historic life-expectancy gap with women, and African Americans were closing their life-expectancy gap with whites. Even the babies were doing well: The infant mortality rate dropped, too.

Sadly, however, if you are a pregnant mortal living in the United States today, your chances of dying appear to be greater than ever. Yes, the total number of women who die in childbirth in America is low. But according to the Centers for Disease Control’s new “National Vital Statistics Report,” the number of women dying in or around childbirth has risen — putting the United States behind some unsurprising countries, like Switzerland and Sweden, and some surprising ones, like Serbia and Macedonia, Qatar and Kuwait, in its rate of maternal mortality. In rankings calculated on 2000 numbers, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the United States at No. 29 on the list, even though, according to the most recent statistics, there is only one country, Tuvalu, that spends more on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States.

Be sure to read the rest.

The US healthcare system is irrevocably broken. There’s no reason at all that the maternal mortality rate should be so high in a country with world-class healthcare facilities, except for the fact that we don’t have world-class access.

I knew people in my very first job, where few people made over $30,000, and only because they’d been hired away from union papers, where pregnancy and birth care wasn’t covered because the pregnant woman’s husband had been hired after she’d become pregnant and it was considered a pre-existing condition. And that was in 1990; it’s much worse since then.

Even I don’t have health insurance ATM, and I make somewhat more than the Frosts, with no kids. But I have student loans, and a mortgage, and unless you work for the kind of law firm that I turned my back on long ago, you’re not going to make a hell of a lot. I also have no dependents to consider taking a gamble on; the only person’s health I’m taking a chance on is my own. But I’ve priced health insurance in the private market, and thanked my lucky stars that I qualify for a couple of different group plans. If I could spare the cash. And I’m only getting it for myself.

Via Bean, who’s got some more information on a ruling which struck down an injunction against getting pregnant again as a condition for a homeless couple to regain custody of their children.