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

Category: Economics

More reasons not to eat at Applebees, Papa Johns or Denny’s

Just in case you weren’t aware that the owners of some big-chain restaurants and huge jerks, check out this piece by Matt Yglesias highlighting the temper-tantrums being thrown by the owners of Applebees, Denny’s and Papa Johns over Obamacare. Their problem? Under Obamacare, small businesses don’t incur any additional tax burden; businesses that already provide health insurance are also in the clear; and so are businesses that pay their employees a living wage. But businesses that both employ more than 25 people and pay extremely low wages have to put some money into the health care system. The multi-millionaires who pay their employees pennies and are the beneficiaries of Republican tax breaks don’t like that, and they’re throwing fits:

Why Breastfeeding Is A Feminist Issue

What’s going so wrong with the breastfeeding and formula-feeding conversation?

Start with the rampant individualism. Conversations about how you feed your baby tend to be preoccupied with women’s choices and decisions.. and then, blame. You know the conversation has little feminist value when you end up at a point where some poor, exhausted woman is trying to justify her decision to formula-feed her baby to you, or likewise, if some other poor woman is trying to justify her reasons for breastfeeding her toddler to you.

The main reason why the breastfeeding/formula feeding conversation is not moving forward is because it is bogged down with this individualism. I think there are several factors behind that. Firstly, public health messages, like those promoting breastfeeding, are notoriously heavy-handed and don’t deal well with nuance. This is a shame because people’s health is actually quite nuanced. Secondly, the breastfeeding message is, in part, a marketing message attempting to compete with the marketing messages of formula companies. When you do this you invariably make women consumers. Thirdly, we live in an era when motherhood is hyper-competitive and driven by perfectionism. Everyone is trying to Get It Super Right Or Terrible Consequences Will Happen For Their Children, and everything seems to come down to mothers and their choices. This leads to conversations that over-emphasise the role of choice in outcomes and also, that invariably run into the limitations of professionalising motherhood when it is still monetarily worthless. Finally, it’s just so terribly easy for a patriarchal culture to put all the responsibility on mothers and not chase the real culprits behind the big decline in breastfeeding and long-term breastfeeding rates in Western countries, which are things like inflexible workplace policies, the absence of universal maternity leave schemes, insufficient anti-discrimination legislation and hostile societal attitudes towards women’s bodies.

One of my good friends was an unapologetic formula-feeder with her children. She tried breastfeeding but having grown up with constant fat-shaming she was unable to ever feel comfortable with breastfeeding. When she found herself forcing her newborn to skip feeds during the very hot days of summer so as not to have to breastfeed in front of visiting family and friends and then panicking about whether she had dehydrated her tiny baby, she decided it was time to formula feed. She loved bottle-feeding – it helped her to start enjoying her baby. Was there much pressure on you, I asked, to breastfeed, and were people judgemental about your formula-feeding? Not that I noticed, my friend told me, but this world can apologise for how much it hated my body before I will apologise for not breastfeeding my children.

Good for her, except, what a bloody heart-breaking way to finally reclaim some space for yourself. Experiences like hers remind me what is so damn wrong with individualism in the breastfeeding/formula-feeding conversation. We’re pushing breastfeeding as a message but we sure aren’t embracing it as a culture. And we somehow blame individual mothers for the shortfall.

After recognising the problem with individualism, often the feminist discussion retreats to a place where everyone agrees to respect one another’s right to choose what is best for them and their babies and then to just all shut the hell up. Initially this makes sense, if everyone is shouting over the top of one another and everyone is feeling very defensive about their feeding decisions then let’s agree to turn down the volume. The problem is that once you turn the volume down on breastfeeding activism and formula-feeding choices we don’t get silence, we get another kind of noise. Because we exist not in a vacuum but in a misogynist culture.

I swear, I really do write about other issues in motherhood, even though I seem to have made breastfeeding my core topic in guest posts at Feministe.. and this is maybe why it has been my topic du jour, because breastfeeding is more than a choice about how to feed your baby, it is a lens through which you can see with absolute clarity the intersection between misogyny and motherhood. There are a million other possible examples but this area of mothering is a stunning case of it. Because, let me be clear about this – women get harassed and shamed and illegally evicted from public space for breastfeeding; women get threatened with losing custody of their children for breastfeeding for ‘too long’; women get ridiculed and bullied for trying to pump milk at work; women get described as a freak show for breastfeeding twins or tandem feeding; women get called names like ‘stupid cow’ or ‘filthy slut’ for breastfeeding; women get told they are sexually abusing their children for breastfeeding; women get told they’re not allowed to keep breast milk in communal fridges because it’s a dirty bodily fluid (and cow’s milk isn’t?); women are bullied into stopping breastfeeding because breasts are the sexual property of their husbands; women get told that breastfeeding is obscene in front of other people’s children or other people’s husbands; women get told their bodies are too fat and too saggy and too veiny to be exposed while breastfeeding; women get told to stay at home with their babies until they are no longer breastfeeding; women get instructed to throw blankets over themselves and their babies if they wish to breastfeed outside the home.. and on it goes. This is not the result of some peculiar sensitivity towards babies and small children eating, this does not happen with bottle-feeding, this is specifically about breastfeeding and it is about policing women’s bodies and lives.

Breastfeeding is a feminist issue not because mummy bloggers like me say it is, but because it’s about working to ensure that women and their bodies are considered as important (as normal) as men and their bodies. Something happens for all of us – regardless of whether we are breastfeeders or not – when a woman is allowed to breastfeed, in public, as a member of her community, while getting shit done in her life – it makes a statement that women belong, that women’s bodies belong, that women are here.

The animosity shown towards mothers who formula-feed is judgemental crusading and it should never be condoned by feminists but you are missing the big picture if you argue that bottle-feeding is demonised and breastfeeding is not – that we’ve gone too far with lactivism. Quite simply, something is very frigging wrong in our world when women are harassed and shamed for doing something that women’s bodies do as a routine part of raising children. This should trouble all feminists.

Breastfeeding also provides an example of how deeply hostile workplace culture is towards mothers.

Breastfeeding can be hard work in the beginning. (I got the latch so messed up when I breastfed my first baby that in the first couple of weeks I almost ended up with the end of my nipple torn off. My baby would finish a breastfeed and dribble blood out of her mouth. I know, so vampire. All those years of averting my slightly horrified gaze from mothers breastfeeding in public when I was young did not prepare me at all well when I came to breastfeed my own baby). Breastfeeding in those early months requires a lot of energy. You need to be eating and drinking and resting regularly or you can’t sustain a milk supply. (Try chasing dairy cows around the paddock all day long and see how much milk you get from them in the evening). This is an excellent argument for maternity leave, lactation breaks in the workplace and generally supporting new mothers. But it also shows you how far we have to go, because in the United States there still isn’t a universal paid maternity leave scheme and even for those who do have access to maternity leave it is usually woefully short. No sooner do you get breastfeeding established and bang! you’re back at work (full-time, of course), and separated from them all day long while now being expected to suddenly get used to a breast pump. And then, oh, breastfeeding didn’t work out for them, what could possibly be the explanation?

When feminists write about these tensions for mothers there is a tendency to argue that because it is so difficult to breastfeed in these circumstances that we need to back-off about breastfeeding. I’m a little sceptical of this strategy, though I think it comes from a good place. Women are entitled to their choices, of course, let’s not head back into individualism, but isn’t it awfully convenient that we never question the institutions of power that happen to arrange themselves in such a way that women have little real choice about breastfeeding?

Because here is the other thing about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is lazy. Ultimately, I came to love breastfeeding as a mother because I am quite lazy. Breastfeeding is fast food. Breastfeeding is multi-tasking. Breastfeeding is portable. Breastfeeding is unstructured and unscheduled. All of these elements are very pleasing to lazy people, like me. So, it annoys me no end as a feminist that we, as a Western culture, stigmatise breastfeeding when in the long-run it can often make mothers’ and children’s lives easier.

I can’t help but be suspicious that we prioritise solutions to this work-life conflict that suit a model of workplace built around men’s lives and that consistently challenge women to find new ways of adapting without ever questioning whether our economy could be moulded just a little more fairly around care work and dependency. Because, dependence is not deviant behaviour – being young, being old, being unwell, being hurt and healing, being disabled – it’s normal life. And this is not hippy stuff; this is just finding a better way of working with capitalism. For that matter, breastfeeding is not hippy, it just is. It’s not some special gift, it’s not a sacrifice, it is just the way mammals generally feed their young.

If we were more accepting of breastfeeding on those grounds instead of trying to up-sell it then maybe we wouldn’t be stuck in such an endless loop of defensiveness with formula-feeding choices. Yes, breastfeeding has nutritional and immunity merits but it is also offers a way of being close with a baby and that, in itself, is valuable enough. There are other ways to experience that closeness, of course, and mothers shouldn’t be forced to parent in that way if they don’t want to, but for those who do, we shouldn’t sabotage them. And this is where the feminist conversation must be particularly careful, and it’s a tricky juggling act, but in our desire to neutralise all that ridiculous individualist blaming of women for their choices we often diminish the significance of their choices to them. Because when we say breastfeeding is not all that important we silence the grief some women feel about not having been able to breastfeed and we take away the sense of achievement other women feel about breastfeeding in spite of multiple obstacles, but possibly worst of all, we undermine the broader message every parent is trying to give, which is that workplace and institutional change needs to happen.. and it needs to happen soon.

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P.S. I want to acknowledge and thank one of the writers of Hoyden About Town, Lauredhel who stayed up late with me one night so I could bounce my arguments around with her and who steered me when I was off-track and reminded me of elements I had overlooked. Thank you, L.

P.P.S. I also want to acknowledge that although I have generalised about breastfeeding mothers here, as I recently discussed on Feministe, fathers sometimes breastfeed, too.

Quick things

I am writing a rather complicated post at the moment for Feministe, so in the meantime..

Quick things to look at – some pretty, pretty pictures in “Yes These Bones Shall Live” over at the International Museum of Women, which is an exhibition of photos of Roller Derby mothers in Canada. (My HTML is not working for some reason at Feministe so here’s an old-fashioned link: http://mama.imow.org/yourvoices/yes-these-bones-shall-live )

Quick things to read and think about –

“When feelings run deep, as they do about mothers and motherhood, the temptation to make extreme statements is high… Motherhood is a raw, tender point of identity, and its relationship to other aspects of ourselves – our other aspirations, our need to work, our need for solitude – almost inevitably involves a tension. It is hard to sit with that tension, which is one reason discussions of motherhood tend toward a split view of the world.

Where we side depends on what we see as the most essential threat. For those working for gender equality over the past forty years, an enduring concern has been that women will be marched back home, restricting the exercise of their talents and their full participation in political and economic life. Efforts to mobilize public opinion against that regressive alternative have at times oversimplified women’s desire to mother and assigned it to a generally backward-looking, sentimental view of women’s place. When taken to the extreme, the argument suggests that women’s care for their children, the time spent as well as the emotions aroused, is foisted on them by purely external economic and ideological forces. Locating the sources of the desire to mother “out there” may temporarily banish the conflict, but ultimately it backfires, alienating women who feel it does not take into account, or help them to attain, their own valued maternal goals.

For those who identify most strongly with their role as mother, the greatest threat has been that caring for children and the honorable motivations behind it will be minimized and misunderstood, becoming one more source of women’s devaluation. Such women feel they suffer not at the hands of traditionalist ideology but rather from the general social devaluation of caregiving, a devaluation with economic and psychological effects. At times, proponents of this position insist on the essential differences between the sexes and the sanctity of conservative-defined “family values”. Such views end up alienating both women who question such prescriptive generalizations and those who feel their own sense of self or their aspirations are not reflected by them.

Most of us feel ill at ease at either pole of this debate, because though the poles represent opposing position, they both flatten the complexity of mothers’ own desires”.

From Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe. This was such a thought-provoking book; I recommend it.

Not Another Mummy Blogger

Hi. I’m the writer from blue milk and I’m thrilled to be writing at Feministe. I write about motherhood from a feminist perspective and I sometimes write for the Australian feminist group blog, Hoyden About Town and other times I write for a couple of mainstream commercial publications. I also work half the week as an economist but I don’t know anything about personal budgets, sorry, as evidenced by my own household budgeting, which is woeful; so, if the figure doesn’t involve at least $100 million then I’m clueless.

I write about juggling work and family, about art and pop culture, about sex and arguments with my partner, about a bunch of traditional feminist topics like rape, breastfeeding, abortion, and the sexualisation of little girls, and I also write about politics. By and large, my writing is pitched squarely within the framework of motherhood and technically, I think this probably makes me a ‘mummy blogger’. I’m not all that offended by the term. I can see that it’s meant to be somewhat insulting, even children get embarrassed calling you ‘Mummy’ once they get to school, it is just that I am too tired to care. And there is a part of me that feels if a label is stigmatised like that then maybe it’s worth defending. After all, the belittling of mummy blogging has a lot in common with the ways in which mothers are marginalised.

There’s a lot we could do to improve the public discussion of motherhood but here is where I would start. We would not be so judgemental towards mothers if we recognised that mothering is work. If you aren’t yet able to accept mothering as work then you have some reading to do – it will involve economics and history. Start with the emergence of industrialisation when family work first became invisible. And if you can’t see that breastfeeding a baby was every bit as important as collecting firewood for family survival, then keep reading back through feudalism. But once you knock that patriarchal lens of distortion from your eyes you will never see mothers and children quite the same way again. Everywhere you look you will see something a little bit horrifying – hours and hours and hours and hours of unpaid labour. It is work performed very often with love; it is work with possibilities of personal reward and great satisfaction, much like some other jobs, except it is unpaid.

We would have better public policy and better rights for women if we were able to acknowledge more honestly that capitalism is not a marketplace, it is rather, a system that involves the intersection of the market with government, families and communities. We are talking about the greatest heist in capitalist history, because it is estimated that unpaid work in the USA amounts to 50 per cent of all hours of work performed. Imagine any other resource vanishing from the national spreadsheet like that. Capitalism, in its present form, could not survive without that unpaid support. It is not mothers who are draining the system, it is mothers and carers who are propping up the system.

I don’t want to over-complicate what is supposed to just be an introductory post here, but it says something about living in a patriarchy that we would have women specialise in a very demanding area of work that is both vitally important to us and utterly worthless in terms of monetary compensation, doesn’t it?

And there’s lots of other stuff to consider – children are not ‘units of production’, they’re small people who deserve to be nurtured with love and dedication; and yes, mothers are driven by an intense maternal desire to be with their children in spite of the sacrifices; and yes, self-ownership through individual wages was an incredibly important step in feminism and who am I, a mother in the workforce, to deny it? All I am saying is that you do not need to believe in universal minimum incomes and legislated entitlements for at-home parents/carers (though it would be nice) to know that there is a problem here when we penalize mothers through regressive tax systems and workplace discrimination for providing essential care work.

And while capitalism helped women mobilise collectively and seek ownership of resources you cannot pretend that capitalism and the patriarchy are not also mutually reinforcing, which is what you are doing when you tell mothers to just stop looking after kids and get a real job, already. Because whenever a mother enters the workplace a deal is being cut somewhere for childcare. Thinking care work vanishes when a woman’s time is suddenly accounted for in paid employment is patriarchal thinking. Either she is negotiating with a partner for him/her to stay home with the children (and obviously, this favours partnered parents over single parents and high-income couples over those in minimum wage jobs); or she is asking a female relative or friend to help out (more unpaid care on the balance sheet); or she is paying someone to look after the children (and fine, if she can afford to and is willing to pay a fair wage to someone for the task; but let’s not kid ourselves, childcare is female-dominated, poorly paid, and has a history of exploiting poor women for the task).

Ok, so this mother is now at work and by being there she sends important signals to her colleagues and employers about the role of women, she also sends a message to her partner (if she has one) and her children about her identity, she’s feeding her family, and hooray! she officially exists in the marketplace. Good for feminism, but as long as we don’t get ahead of ourselves and expect her to be the entire gateway for female liberation. In fact, it’s an uncomfortable notion but dual, high-income households have seen poor households slip even further behind since women joined the workforce. Turns out when rich women are working and marrying rich husbands, who are also working, that this only widens the gap between them and poor households. Go figure. Obviously, I’m not against women in the workforce but I’m saying this stuff is complicated. It will take a few bites of the apple before we get it sorted out.

If feminism, in approaching the unresolved question of mothers, does not recognise that motherhood is messy and emotional and diverse and political then it has missed the mark. It is important not to try to over-simplify mothers, not to stereotype them and not to ignore that their tasks are real work. Again and again in my writing I try to emphasize that last point, because I suspect much of the hostility towards mothers, including between mothers, would fade if we just understood that mothers are people trying to do a job and it’s consuming and tiring. It is difficult to imagine we would be bothered with The Mummy Wars if we were mobilising around the exploitation of unpaid care in our economy instead.

Because how ludicrous, how shameful, how utterly trivial our judgements of a teenage mother suddenly become with this one acknowledgement – that she is working, that it is hard work and it is for no pay and no recognition. Or our judgements of a mother with a disabled child having an outburst in public; or a mother breastfeeding her toddler; or a mother trying to help her teenage child with their drug addictions; or even, a mother blogging. (Oh, you want to tell me how I should do my unpaid work more to your liking? Fabulous, do tell). It sometimes helps to remember that even the most privileged mother is occasionally woken in the middle of the night by her sick toddler and sits bolt upright in bed, bleary-eyed and shivering in the dark, to catch vomit or shit in her bare hands. It may take some of the sting out of her, apparently, selfish lifestyle.

It is an uphill battle though, some of the fiercest defenders of mothering as a task too precious to be sullied with the term ‘work’ are mothers, themselves. There’s a lot invested in an identity when it is all you have. This does not mean that we can’t question the decisions mothers make or criticise the institution of motherhood. In fact, I would be lost as a mother without feminism and its difficult questions. But as feminists we must ask questions and listen to the answers, we must be prepared to change or expand our theories when we get it wrong, and I advise that we tread lightly in these discussions – that we tread as someone walking over the toil of unpaid workers.

Millennials and Economic Justice

I’m a millennial.

I’m a recent college graduate—no matter how much more established colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties say, “I know how hard it is to be a recent grad” or an MSNBC (or any other news network) panel of non-millennials (read: older white dudes who seem to be the sole media mouthpieces of the economy) discussing student debt blindly compare it with their generation, as if this is going to advance the conversation on how to solve this problem further, they have no idea what it is like to come of age and into adulthood during a triple dip recession in a country and culture that keeps being gnawed away by privatization and crisis capitalism.

A few weeks before I graduated, a statistic came out stating that more than fifty percent of recent college graduates were either unemployed or underemployed. But what does “employed” even mean these days? I’m employed—but I need to juggle multiple jobs and freelance gigs to make what begins to look like a salary, forget about benefits. I have friends that are employed full time with actual salaries—but their jobs wouldn’t even think about giving them any benefits. Does that make us underemployed? What the does underemployed even mean? I’m sure there is an official economic definition, but it still sounds like a phony excuse to me.

Millennials are frequently cited as demographic statistics in articles—but the young people who are forgoing health insurance because they don’t have any other choice or are teetering on the precipice of defaulting on their loans because they ignored Sallie Mae for too long are rarely acknowledged as being trapped in a new culture of precariousness.

Saving money for the future has become a hilarious joke.

I see a lot of my friends in my generation having serious problems abusing drugs—of all kinds—as a form of escapism that becomes an obsession. I see a lot of my generation working minimum wage jobs—kicking themselves for their college degrees that they were always told they were supposed to get along with enormous burdensome debt–because they are unable to break into a career in their field of study. Others of us are constantly hustling, juggling multiple jobs and trying to find ourselves a viable space in the brave new economy. We know that even though we are working our asses off—laughing at eight hour work days as we continue to our serial jobs once our first is over—any of these gigs could evaporate at any given moment.

Our role in the labor force is precarious in a way that changes how we think about the future. Most of our future plans logically have to prioritize work, but many of us have no idea whether or not we will have still have certain gigs. We don’t commit to anything. We rarely have much savings. It is impossible to make plans. It is difficult to answer “long term plan” questions in job interviews. My personal definition of “long term” is September—and yes, I have no idea where I will be then.

Still, I have a difficult time saying that it is “hard” to be a recent grad—there are so many who are in the same, or worse economic predicaments from all ages, that these conditions are too universally normal to call “hard” for one group more than others. What I personally would call it is divisive—whereas many others have been affected by the recession, we were somewhat born into it, and are constantly coming up with a whole new set of rules to navigate what makes up the new “normal.”

It makes it difficult to take advice from older generations who do not realize what it is like to have this economic climate as the starting point of our careers. My father always tells me that my uncle used to say, “If you don’t like your job, quit.” My uncle clearly wasn’t living in 2012 in a double/triple dip recession that just keeps on dipping.

It is also difficult to know what standards we should hold for ourselves—how can you demand more when you are told that you should be grateful for anything and know that you are the last ones hired and the first ones fired? How do we know how long to put up with certain conditions—sexual harassment, late pay, expectations to be on call and responding to e-mails around the clock—before our need for sanity outweighs our need for economic livelihood? How do we convey that we are trying our hardest?

In addition to all of this, how do we talk about our place in the economy with each other? With so many of us coping with the same conditions in different ways, it seems insensitive to talk about the trials and tribulations of the workday with unemployed friends, roommates and partners. But when you work sixteen hour days regularly, what else do you have to talk about? Does it affect a relationship if one partner is struggling and another is not? How do we overcome this? (Can we?)

Our current economic climate is creating individualistic competition and exhaustion—as well as massive depression and drug addiction. In addition to being an economic crisis, it is also a psychological and existential crisis. If you think this is a dramatic statement, look at the suicides committed over student loan debt and joblessness.

However, as society is structured right now this is only going to be further institutionalized as the new and unshakable reality of living and working—or not working–in the twenty-first century. It’s not just the statistics of capitalism gone awry—it’s a whole generation that is characterized by the social and psychological effects of wild, unabated capitalism and privatization. It’s a feeling of worthlessness and defeat at the foot of this machine. It’s depression and escapism and refusal to confront the world. It’s suicides—more and more of them. It’s the sick desperation of scrambling for jobs that aren’t even that good. It’s knowing that this is not “the way things are” but that the “way things are” is rigged for profits and the beneficiaries of income inequality. It’s knowing that these beneficiaries were bailed out, and that this was at our expense.

Occupy Wall Street may have lost momentum as a movement. There may be no more camps or massive rallies, or echoes throughout downtown Manhattan. But its demands are never out of style—we need economic justice for our survival and we need it now.

Health Care and a Dirty Word Called “Tax”

There’s a lot we can talk about in response to the U.S. Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”) decision on the Affordable Care Act. It may have created a deep schism in the conservative wing of the Court [Huffington Post]. Its clear from dicta in the various opinions that there are five justices willing to further restrict federal power based on the commerce clause (which bodes ill for a great deal of civil rights legislation) [Opinion on Bloomberg]. But of course the big news is that Roberts’ opinion upheld the individual mandate on the theory that it was an appropriate use of the federal government’s authority to tax.

Cue the conservative shit fit [Washington Examiner, Feministe].

Where I work the response has been no less trollish. (Seriously, sometimes I want to ask my coworkers if they have a Feministe Top Troll plaque in their living rooms.) People are angry. They’re angry that they lost. They’re angry that they are required to purchase health insurance (nevermind that they all have excellent health coverage with a tiny premium mostly paid by our employer). But most of their anger is directed at the idea that they are being taxed. My local rep is even introducing a constitutional amendment to require Congress to label tax bills [Ben Quayle’s Congressional page].

On Friday a coworker flagged me down in the hall to rant about the “tax” and Obama’s purported deceptiveness and to tell me about the Constitutional amendment. I (deciding to act a little trollish myself) asked why she was so concerned given that we have health insurance at work and she has other guaranteed benefits to rely on so the likelihood that she would ever be required to pay the “tax” is somewhere between zero and minus 1 billion. Her response: “Its personal because I don’t want the government thinking it can steal my money.”

Well, its personal for me too. I grew up without medical care even though I was chronically ill. For a years I was denied treatment because of my parents’ religious beliefs and later because we simply couldn’t afford it. Every doctors visit, every recommended test, every prescription was choice between my health and our collective survival. Even when my parent’s scratched their way into the working/middle class my chronic condition meant that we had to choose between my medication and heat or my treatment and the mortgage.

The ACA is not the ideal solution by any stretch. I prefer we just move to a straight up single payer system, but this law for all its flaws is intended to make sure that every person has access to the medical care they require. Making that happen is personal because no one should have to choose between their health and their family’s survival.

For me that is what this debate over “taxes” boils down to. In the starkest terms its a question of whether we as a society believe that holding on to money is more important than someone else’s survival.

Choice: It’s None of Your Business

It’s that age.

I have one friend who is hosting her baby shower. I have another friend who is waiting at an abortion clinic.

Another friend—of the friend who is having a baby—just bought a pink blanket with baby elephants on it for the baby shower. I’ve been sending my other friend funny text messages all morning—she is too strong and fierce to let me wait with her at the clinic, no matter how much I pleaded.

Both girls made the perfect choice. Because both girls made their choice—something that will shape what the rest of their lives look like.

So, I want to write about choice today—being a woman, republicans and how the choices we make are no one’s business except our own.

Having a baby at age 22 doesn’t look easy—but as her birthday is around the corner, we celebrate her upcoming arrival. Having an abortion at age 22 doesn’t look like an easy decision to make—but having that option is something to celebrate. Neither are tragic or to be despaired. As much as those who are pro-choice lament a young woman being saddled with a child not being able to have as much freedom as her childless friends, at some point her choice to become a mother needs to be accepted and celebrated. As much as women hear about another woman having an abortion and feel nauseas, sympathetic and upset at imagining—or remembering—that decision, it’s important to respect that choice as something responsible for the future. After all, she is in good company—one in every three women gets an abortion, and sixty percent of those women are already married.

Sometimes we don’t use as much protection as we should. Sometimes we use every type of protection possible—and despite the fact that it is 99% effective in conjunction with another form that is 99.7% effective, we are the .03 percent. Until there is a radical revolution in biology, and men can also get pregnant, we will always be at a disadvantage—as we fight for workplace and economic equality, leadership positions, and careers and contributions to the world around us that go far beyond the domestic sphere, it’s important that choice is available, affordable and accessible.

It’s a difficult choice to make—no one is in danger of trivializing it. But the social stigma and forced tragedy of it seem to only make it worse.

So, I would like to say a few words to all of the Republican (and Democrat) legislators trying to make abortion inaccessible—first through manipulating insurance plans away from covering it, then through enforcing mandatory counseling, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds designed to guilt women about their choice and then through absurd regulations designed to shut down abortion clinics, making abortion nominally legal but inaccessible.

Those words? Fuck. You. All.

You are all men. You have no idea what it is like to be a woman, and what it is like to be pregnant, not be sure if you are pregnant or even any grasp of how much taking a pregnancy to term affects every aspect of daily life—and then the future thereafter. You can have children, see them when you come home, and continue your career (as an ideological terrible politician) being as absent as you choose to, or not to be.

Your desire to control women’s bodies is sickening. The painstaking effort you are taking on legislation to choke our right to choose from the outside, all the while cutting funding from institutions that actually matter would be absurd—if it weren’t so immediately dangerous to our lives and futures.

As men who wish to be called men, you have no role in the abortion debate other than to unquestioningly support women in whatever choice they might choose to make. Politicians, we are not your daughters, and even if we were you have no right to compromise our futures with one stroke of your patriarchal pen. Boyfriends, lovers, flings, sex buddies and men we knew for a night, this is not your choice. It is ours. We will figure it out. Trust us.