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

Month: April 2006

Suggestion Box

So I wanted to follow up on the post about better linking habits, but wanted to make sure I was alert enough to do it.

Before I get started: I’m a big luddite. (“What is this Hy Par Text of which you speak?”) If something doesn’t sound right here or in future, it probably isn’t.

First up, the simplest solution–from Heliologue–which I actually kinda like:

I think the obvious option is to simply turn off comments for the “big” blogger’s post so that commenters have to go to the original post.

Hestia elaborates on it here:

If it’s just a matter of familiarity, maybe there could be a Don’t Read My Blog Week, during which the bigger blogs could turn off all comments and link only to posts from smaller blogs without elaborating on them outside of the smaller blog’s comment threads. It could either highlight several small blogs or a single blog that could use more attention.

It would be one very effective way to direct people over to another space to talk. I’m not sure whether or not it would effectively cut off discussion altogether. It seems like people here are nice enough and chatty enough that it would work.

Would this annoy the hell out of all of you?

Next, bitchlab favors a labelling system:

1. ask the bloggers.
2. we could make a badge or something that indicates the blogger’s preference so a vistor knows that they shouldn’t link without pushing discussion to the linked blog.
3. Blogger could post bit on their policy in the sidebar. (for those who don’t know how to modify their sidebar, some of us could get together to give instructions for major blog software.)

I worry that this would put the onus on the blogger rather than the miner.

And then a few people commented on this set of ideas:

Brooklynite:

After you post a link (and close comments and encourage people to comment at the other site), you could add a follow-up post (not an update to the original) a bit later if the discussion at the other site proves interesting. Quote from a couple of the comments, and encourage folks to head over and add their voices.

I like this idea a lot myself, and it ties into what keeps me coming back to a blog: a lively discussion on a particular post. Linking to comments rather than only to a post might be a way to keep the original discussion on its tracks and get people to contribute over there.

And yami at Green Gabbro linked to an easy RSS tutorial that I’ll have to take a look at sometime:

Hestia: I heartily recommend Bloglines for anyone new to RSS reading.

And then! Came up with a template and proof of concept for linking and tying together comments threads!

All: I’ve just whipped together a proof-of-concept you might enjoy, where I attach this comment thread to one of my blog entries. The templating scheme needs some help, and Feministe’s engine is for some reason only publishing the first 10 comments in the thread (I think this might be default WordPress behavior), and setting it up required intermediate to advanced tech-nerd skills… but I think it does prove some kind of concept. If there’s interest, I’d be happy to write a tutorial on how to do this (for WordPress only, though, I have no idea how to port to other software).

My thought is, throwing together a collection of threads would:

Give more exposure to the discussion happening on smaller sites
Allow each blog involved to maintain its idiosyncratic mix of chosen discussion topics and moderation styles
Maybe help unite a bunch of related tangents, so each tangent gets its own arena and you’re not repeating the same discussion at different sites?

I’m still somewhat confused, but I like it!

Takers? It’d be a fun way to blog-hop a post, particularly if I could get a few bloggers to take part.

Finally, brownfemipower and textaisle were apparently mulling the question over at around the same time. (brownfemipower follows up here.)

First, some words from textaisle about why I think this question is an important one, and not necessarily incompatible with blogging:

Blogs, in spite of so much triumphalist rhetoric about their egalitarian nature, do a pretty crappy job of disrupting pre-existing hierarchies. They’re written by people and the classes of people with blog power look a whole lot like the classes of people with other privileges in this world. Even among marginalized groups, blog communities tend to look more inward than outward.

The navel-gazing is not the medium’s fault. It is by no means the inevitable consequence of the technology. Quite the contrary, in fact, as the triumphalists point out, the internets can take you to many a splendid place far from your comfort zone. The problem is that we’re not going.

This is me. I am naturally hidebound, an obsessive-refresher rather than a clicker-through. I want to do this so that I take part in more conversations in more venues with more and different people. I know that there is no blogging without linking; there seem, however, to be ways to open traffic rather than bogart it.

Which is why textaisle’s solution is an awesome one:

Blogthropology: the study of people, their cultures and their characteristics by way of their blogs.

(snip)

Blogthropology is a political project aimed at creating solidarity, moving from respect that isn’t to respect. I don’t think of it as an end in itself but instead as a blueprint for other interactions and other dialogues, hopefully happening outside of blogs altogether once we have wrenched ourselves away from our own sites. I am confident that if blogging is usful as a political tool, it’s perhaps most useful as a tool to learn how to discuss. And I don’t mean how to shout louder, jockey for position, and complain about who gets how much attention and how. Blogthropology can realistically acclimate us to decentering our own identities and our own privileges, toward building equitable models of give and take that are not blog-specific. So, let’s make a habit of it. Tenth day of every month.

I’d like to try this myself. Any suggestions? Any interested parties?

What I’m Reading Today

I finally set up an account at Bloglines, so that I can read all the blogs and news articles my little heart desires in one shot (if you’re not on my blogroll and you should be, leave your URL in the comments). Which means that these massive round-ups will be more common. There’s just too much good stuff out there, and not enough time to write full posts on it all. Check these out:

Read More…Read More…

Saletan Wrong Again

William Saletan completely misses the boat on emergency contraception.

Emergency contraception, also known as the “morning-after pill” and marketed in this country as “Plan B,” is a drug that a woman can take after sex but before an embryo attaches to her womb. If you don’t know much about this murky week in the reproductive process, it’s time to learn. Lawmakers in many states are deciding right now whether EC will be easy or hard to get. Some say it causes abortions. Some say it only prevents them. And the dirty little secret is, nobody really knows.

And… wrong. We actually do know how ECPs work, because they contains the exact same hormones as birth control pills, and we have a pretty good idea as to how those operate. They thicken cervical mucus so that it’s tougher for sperm to get through, and they inhibit ovulation. Those are their primary functions.

A small clarification needs to be made here, too. “Emergency contraception” is a broad term, and is usually used in reference to emergency contraception pills, or ECPs. But another form of emergency contraception is the insertion of an IUD soon after unprotected sex. That often gets forgotten or overlooked (and indeed, Saletan doesn’t mention it).

Some have speculated that birth control pills and Plan B can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. That’s what Saletan means when he says that “nobody really knows.” He’s right, we don’t know for sure whether or not BC and ECPs prevent implantation — but the most recent, comprehensive studies suggest that they don’t.

Many people think EC can’t be birth control, since it’s taken after intercourse. This is—forgive me—a misconception. Sex-education classes often give the impression that the egg waits for sperm to show up. It’s usually the other way around. An egg loses its fertility within 12 to 24 hours. It takes sperm about 10 hours to reach the egg, and sperm can survive in the female reproductive tract for up to five days. If you want to get pregnant, you’d better send in the sperm before the egg shows up. But if you don’t want to get pregnant, and the sperm are on their way or already there, you still have time to stop the egg.

So far, so good. (Interesting piece of trivia: In one study, sperm survived in a woman’s body for 12 days after intercourse. That, obviously, is exceptionally rare).

That’s the idea behind Plan B. “It prevents pregnancy mainly by stopping the release of an egg,” says the manufacturer, Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. However, Barr adds, the drug “may also prevent the fertilization of an egg” or prevent a fertilized egg “from attaching to the uterus.”

There’s the rub. If you think a fertilized egg is a human being, as anti-abortion activists do, then preventing it from attaching to the uterus is abortion. Some anti-abortion groups—Americans United for Life, the American Life League and Concerned Women for America—assert flatly that Plan B does this. The National Right to Life Committee, however, isn’t sure. It’s taking no position until Plan B’s effects are clarified. The South Dakota legislature, which banned abortions a month ago, exempted any “contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing”—i.e., Plan B.

Now, wait a minute: Here’s the problem with adopting anti-choice terms and their skewed view of reality. Abortion by definition ends an established pregnancy. Pregnancy by definition occurs when a fertilized egg attaches to the uterus. How can an “abortion” occur if there was never a pregnancy to begin with?

But nevermind that. The anti-choice world view may be a little like looking down the rabbit hole, but Saletan is perfectly happy to swallow it up.

Let’s look at this again: “If you think a fertilized egg is a human being, as anti-abortion activists do, then preventing it from attaching to the uterus is abortion. ” Now how seriously would we take this statement if I said, “If you think that the human capacity for love is kept in the heart, as I do, then a heart transplant effectively transfers one person’s capacity for love to another”? Sure, I might believe it, but does that make it true or valid or even worth discussing? There are medical truths, and there are ideological agendas, and there are religious beliefs. Sometimes they overlap, and sometimes they don’t. But accepting this anti-choice argument at face value and repeating it as if the anti-choice idea that pregnancy begins at conception and you can abort a pregnancy that never existed is just as valid as the actual medical definitions of pregnancy and abortion is plain irresponsible. And it’s bad journalism.

Even the Catholic Church is uncertain. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops authorizes doctors to offer a rape survivor a drug that blocks ovulation or fertilization “if, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already.” According to the Catholic Health Association, most Catholic hospitals interpret this directive liberally, since conception is hard to verify and there’s “no direct scientific evidence” that EC blocks implantation.

“Conception is hard to verify”? Try… nearly impossible. Pregnancy tests detect pregnancies, not fertilized eggs. Which he might have known had he, say, read his own article:

as the Catholic Health Association explains, “There is no current method for ascertaining that an ovum has been fertilized until implantation.” It takes a week and a half for hormones to register in pregnancy tests. To verify fertilization before then, you’d have to open the woman up. And that would kill the embryo.

And about half of fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant anyway, shedding serious doubt on the contention that fertilization should be the point at which we consider “life” and “pregnancy” to begin.

If the two camps were to stop spinning and listen for a moment, they might learn something from each other. Proponents of EC, who talk so much about choice and information, might realize that their denials of any abortion risk from Plan B, through semantics or stretching of the evidence, deprive women of informed consent. The right to choose a pill that’s probably birth control but possibly abortion includes the right to know that’s what you’re choosing.

I agree that women have a right to know that both ECPs and birth control pills may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. But that doesn’t make it an abortion, not by any stretch. And putting Plan B in a completely different category that birth control pills is innaccurate, and furthers the confusion about what it actually does.

Saletan has done us all a major disservice with this misleading and factually inaccurate article.

God and Abortion Rights

Like many people who hold religious beliefs and are also pro-choice — and indeed, who are pro-choice in part because of the emphasis on goodness and respect for human rights that are ingrained in their faith — I’m tired of the right-wing anti-abortion campaign claiming that they have a monopoly on God. Skim the Bible for the word “abortion” — you won’t find it. The Bible doesn’t condone nor condemn abortion. It does, in one instance, represent it as a property crime (you cause a woman to miscarry, and you have to pay her husband a fine):

“And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

Exodus 21:22-25

If a fetus is the full equivalent of a human life, shouldn’t the man who caused the woman to miscarry be expected to pay with his life?

Luckily, other faith-friendly pro-choicers are coming out on the offensive, and demonstrating that support for reproductive rights is not only not immoral, but fitting within a religious code that values justice and human rights.

The Interfaith Prayer Breakfast has been part of Planned Parenthood’s annual convention for four years. Most ministers and rabbis at the breakfast have known the group far longer.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, drew clergy members in the early 20th century by relating the suffering of women who endured successive pregnancies that ravaged their health and sought illegal abortions in their desperation, said the Rev. Thomas R. Davis of the United Church of Christ, in his book “Sacred Work, Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances.”

In the 1930’s, Jewish and mainline Protestant groups began to voice their support for birth control. In 1962, a Maryland clergy coalition successfully pressed the state to permit the disbursal of contraception. In the late 1960’s, some 2,000 ministers and rabbis across the country banded together to give women information about abortion providers and to lobby for the repeal of anti-abortion laws.

“The clergy could open that door because the clergy had a certain moral authority,” said Mr. Davis, who is chairman of Planned Parenthood’s clergy advisory board but whose book is not sponsored by the group. “They balanced the moral authority of the critics.”

The role of religious communities in securing abortion rights cannot be emphasized enough. Religious leaders took a look around and saw, for example, that 20% of hospital admissions for pregnancy-related problems in New York and California were the result of dangerous illegal abortions. They saw that poor women were more likely to be maimed or killed by their illegal abortions. They saw that even for the women who were able to secure safe illegal abortions — and thanks to a handful of conscientious providers, these women did exist — the shame of having to go underground for a basic medical procedure was deeply harmful. They saw that, even after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, low-income women like Gerri Santoro (caution: graphic) still lacked the basic resources to make reproductive rights a reality. They saw, basically, that limiting reproductive rights hurts women.

And so they mobilized. Clergy, along with activists, community members and police officers, organized the Jane network, which connected women with safe clandestine abortion services. Should such a service become necessary again, progessive religious people will continue to be some of our strongest allies.

As the scrape of silverware quieted at the breakfast, the Rev. W. Stewart MacColl told the audience how a Presbyterian church in Houston that he had led and several others had worked with Planned Parenthood to start a family planning center. Protesters visited his church. Yet his 900 parishioners drove through picket lines every week to attend services. One Sunday, he and his wife, Jane, took refreshments to the protesters out of respect for their understanding of faith, he said.

Mr. MacColl said a parishioner called him the next day to comment: “That’s all very well for you to say, but you don’t drive to church with a 4-year-old in the back seat of your car and have to try to explain to him when a woman holds up a picture of a dead baby and screams through the window, ‘Your church believes in killing babies.’ ”

Mr. MacColl said of the abortion protester: “She would, I suspect, count herself a lover of life, a lover of the unborn, a lover of God. And yet she spoke in harshness, hatred and frightened a little child.”

Mr. MacColl quoted the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: ” ‘Sometimes the worst evil is done by good people who do not know that they are not good.’ ”

The crowd murmured its assent.

Then Mr. MacColl challenged them. “The trouble is, I find myself reflected in that woman,” he said. “Because I can get trapped in self-righteousness and paint those who oppose me in dark colors they do not deserve. Is that, at times, true of you, as well?”

This time, people were silent.

He makes a good point. It is easy to demonize those who disagree with you, particularly when they’re just as passionate as you are. The difference, of course, is that a passion for limiting rights and oppressing an entire segment of the population tends to be a less salient argument than fighting for basic human rights and individual autonomy.

“The more we are able to cultivate the capacity in every person — women and men — to make informed ethical judgments both in ourselves and our society, the more we are coming into relationship with the transcendent, with God,” said the Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary.

“Human existence as a materialistic quest for power and dominance, a crass manipulation of fear and intolerance for political gain, drives us apart both from one another and from God,” she said. “For what does it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?”

UPDATE: Allow me to clarify a minor point. I wrote about this because I thought it was interesting, not because I think that religious beliefs should at all influence legal standards. They shouldn’t. That should be obvious enough from everything I’ve ever written here.

And, not to criticize anyone in particular, but I’m quickly tiring of the legal strawman that is too often propped up in response to any assertion or observation. If I say, “I think it’s really abhorrent that Neil Boortz said that Rep. McKinney looks like a ‘ghetto slut;‘ if you support him by listening to his show, now might be a good time to stop,” it doesn’t mean that I’m trying to legally infringe on Neil Boortz’s legal right to free speech (and I’m not the government, so, you know, that would be tough for me to do either way). And if I say that religious people have had, and continue to have, an influence on abortion rights, it doesn’t mean that I think religion should dictate law on abortion. Ok, bitch over.

Anorexia Before Spring Break

On a Xanga blog ring called the Bikini Coming Soon Challenge, one 19-year-old related the anxieties she was experiencing only days after returning from a week on the beach with friends: “Tonight I was looking on Facebook at people’s albums from spring break. I saw the guy’s album that I kind of was starting to like before spring break. In his album were pictures of all these pretty girls — tan, skinny, looked perfect in their bikinis — and all these guys were commenting on the pics: ‘She is so hot!’ or ‘wooowww!!’ Stuff like that. Seriously, that’s what I want.

“This just makes me want to lose so much weight and then have those guys see me.”

She concluded: “I hate boys, I hate my body. Goodnight.”

This is the problem with valuing women’s looks above all else.

How Texas Got Itself The Highest Teen Birthrate In The Country

It’s not exactly rocket science.

Texas has the highest teen birth rate in the country, and an incredibly high rate of unintended pregnancies. Because that’s what happens when your “pro-life” legislatures cut funding for family planning and tell every woman to be abstinent instead.

Through her divorce and the struggles of raising three girls on her salary at the Sonic Drive-In, there was one thing in Tanya Wilson’s life that came easy.

Every three months, Wilson drove to the Planned Parenthood in her Panhandle hometown to get a birth control shot for free, most times with little or no wait. It was a great relief for a 34-year-old woman who didn’t want any more children but lacked money for a tubal ligation.

Suddenly in January, her relief turned to stress. Wilson was among hundreds of patients across 17 counties who learned that the clinic they relied on for birth control, annual exams, Pap tests, breast cancer screenings, sexually transmitted disease tests and other services was closing because of funding cuts triggered by two little-known provisions tucked into the state’s budget last session.

And no, it’s not as convenient as, “Well she can just go somewhere else.”

She’s been pleading with the town’s only remaining family planning clinic, which has been picking up other patients, to see her. She’s one of many who hasn’t had a Pap test in the past year because it would require driving an hour to the Amarillo Planned Parenthood.

She doesn’t know how she’d get there. Besides the job and the kids, her 1992 Honda Accord smokes, leaks oil and probably couldn’t make the trip.

“I work, and I’ve got three girls already. I don’t need no more kids,” said Wilson, who is being abstinent with her live-in boyfriend because she’s a month late on her shot. “I don’t understand why they would close (the clinic). It’s just caused a lot of grief for a lot of women.”

Well, that’s exactly why they closed the clinic.

But Republican authors of the provisions, Sens. Bob Deuell and Tommy Williams, insist they intended to expand women’s access to health care services and counseling.

“Yes, Senator Deuell is motivated by taking money away from facilities that provide abortions,” said spokesman Todd Gallaher. “That is not the primary motivation.”

We intend to expand women’s access to health care services and counseling by cutting funding to places which provide health care services and counseling. Ok then.

It should be pointed out here that many of the clinics that lost funding don’t perform abortions, but they do run abstinence-promotion and sexual health programs and offer birth control to low-income women — all things which help to lower the abortion rate. But nevermind that little detail.

Oh, and this is coming from the state that the Alan Guttmacher Institute ranked 45th in women’s health care.

Before the changes, fewer than 20 percent of women eligible for state-funded family planning services received them, the health department estimates. That left as many as 1.5 million women without help in avoiding unintended pregnancies.

Now, the situation is even worse. But don’t worry — they haven’t forgotten that women are better off pregnant and “in crisis” than able to prevent that pregnancy in the first place.

The rider sponsored by Williams, of The Woodlands, earmarked $5 million of the state’s family planning funds over the next two years for crisis pregnancy centers. The centers counsel pregnant women about options other than abortion but don’t provide family planning or health services.

The health department estimates about 15,000 women will lose access to family planning because of Williams’ rider.

Special, no? Give more money to CPCs, which routinely lie and mislead their clients in order to push their ideological agenda, and cut off pregnancy-prevention funding so that more women will be forced to go to those CPCs (where, notably, they still won’t be given any comprehensive information about sexual health, and won’t be offered any tools — other than abstinence — to prevent a future unintended pregnancy).

The Panhandle, which five years ago had 17 Planned Parenthood clinics, now has two. Abstinence-only education, which is a profound failure, continues to be pushed throughout the state (and, hell, throughout the country). It’s stuff like this that makes me consider moving to the UK.