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

Month: October 2006

More Bad News for Repro Rights

Nicaragua will likely ban abortion today. Leaders in the Catholic Church have helped to draft and promote the new law, which outlaws abortion even to save the life of the pregnant woman. Women who have abortions, and people who perform them, could face up to 30 years in prison.

The current Nicaraguan abortion law (fyi, link is in Spanish) allows for a rape and life exception, and gives abortion providers a maximum of 10 years in prison.

“The current law allows a small door in which abortions can be performed, and we are trying to close that door,” said Dr. Rafael Cabrera, an obstetrician and leader of the Yes to Life Movement. “We don’t believe a child should be destroyed under the pretext that a woman might die.”

Some pretext.

Only 24 legal abortions were performed in Nicaragua last year — compared to an estimated 32,000 illegal ones. World-wide, a woman dies every six minutes from an illegal abortion (includes a graphic, disturbing photo and is probably not work-safe). Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures in the world — 46 million abortions are performed every year. Almost half of them (20 million) are illegal. Every year, approximately 80,000 of the women who have illegal abortions in unsafe conditions die from complications of the procedure. Thousands more are injured, maimed, and treated like criminals for exercising their right to bodily autonomy.

Of course, we know which laws kill women and which ones don’t. Conservatives here and abroad, however, are taking us down a dangerous path which values fetal life over the lives of born women — and does almost nothing to lower the abortion rate. Just consider which countries have the highest rates of abortion, and which have the lowest. Brazil, for example, has a higher abortion rate than the United States (which is notably high), even though the procedure is illegal there. In many Scandanavian and other European nations, abortion is widely accessible and free — and yet, because of comprehensive sex education and birth control access, they have the lowest abortion rates in the world. Another example:

Rumania provides a unique case study of the factors that influence the use of unsafe abortion: in 1966 legal abortion was restricted and the abortion-related maternal mortality rate increased sharply, ten times higher than the average for the rest of Europe; in 1989 abortion was again made available on request and the number of maternal deaths fell sharply. By contrast the Netherlands has the lowest reported abortion rate because of a non-restrictive abortion law within a comprehensive framework that includes universal sex education in schools and easily accessible family planning services and the provision of emergency contraception. Of the 29,266 abortions performed there in 1997, the complication rate for first trimester treatments was 0,3% with no resulting deaths whatsoever.

But it’s not about the woman’s life, or even preventing abortion. It’s about asserting social control over and through women’s bodies. And it’s not just in Nicagragua.

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Crime, Pregnancy and Civil Rights

Jessica sends on this link: A Missouri judge requires a woman to not have any more children as a condition of her parole. This isn’t the first time that a judge has seen it as his right to strip a woman of her reproductive rights. It underlines our social views of women as not-quite-human vessels who may have their fundamental and civil rights taken away because of their reproductive capacities.

The judge claims that his decision isn’t a moral one, and that he’s trying to “help” her because the fathers of her three children aren’t paying child support, which is causing her financial strain. His idea of “help” is to limit her basic human rights, and coerce her into abortion should she become pregnant (pregnancy doesn’t violate her parole conditions, but childbirth does).

In this country, a woman loses many of her civil rights as soon as she becomes pregnant. A non-pregnant woman can use drugs without facing jail time (buying, selling, possessing, etc is illegal, but being an addict is not); pregnant women who use drugs have been charged with child abuse or with being drug dealers to the unborn (no, I am not making this up). A non-pregnant woman can have her medical wishes carried out through her living will; in many states, living wills don’t apply if a woman is pregnant.

All these issues came up in a phone conference with Lynn Paltrow that I took part in a few weeks ago. Lynn (who I think is just about one of the coolest feminists out there) founded National Advocates for Pregnant Women after working for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. Her work at the ACLU demonstrated that pregnant women are often ignored in the reproductive rights debate, where resources are disproportionally dedicated to abortion rights (because, of course, abortion rights are disproportionately attacked). But the anti-choice view of abortion — that it’s bad because the woman should not have any say about what happens to her own body and the fetus inside of it, and that the fetus should have greater rights than the pregnant woman — have shifted onto the bodies of pregnant women who intend to give birth. And women who want to prevent pregnancy. And women who want to use science and technology to increase their chances of getting pregnant. And women who want to have sex. In other words, reproductive rights are about almost all of us, and anti-choice politics affect every woman.

Check out more of the work that Lynn and NAPW are doing. They’re also holding a summit in Atlanta to, as it’s titled, “Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women.” Register now!

New Casualties of the War on Terror

Adama Bah, a 16-year-old girl of Guinean origin, was arrested, detained, questioned by the FBI, required to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and follow a 10pm curfew on accusations that she is an “imminent threat” to national security. The FBI provided no evidence of the threat she posed. They refuse to discuss her case.

She has now been released, but because she was arrested on immigration grounds (she believed she had legal status, but her childhood visa had run out), she now faces deportation — to a country where female genital cutting is commonplace, and where she will likely be forced to submit to the procedure.

Her father, a cab driver, was already deported because his visa had lapsed. Her mother, who is illiterate and speaks little English, lost the trinket stand that she ran, leaving the family without any income. Adama is now in charge of caring for her four siblings, who are all American citizens.

Her hearing is today.

Now Tell Me More About What You’re Wearing

Simultaneously fascinating and depressing short piece from BBC correspondent Frances Harrison on the challenges of reporting from Tehran. When she’s not seeking access to leaders who want to know if she’s “with Islam or with them,” she’s taking criticism for what’s really important: Her clothes.

One [viewer] called the BBC’s cable channel in Britain to complain that I was wearing a red headscarf on TV.

Apparently they feared it would affect my objectivity. It prompted a long debate online about my headscarf – interestingly not about what I had reported.

As Harrison goes on to mention, her headscarf wasn’t optional; failure to wear it in Iran is potentially punishable by a two-month jail term.

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The Paradox of Veiling

I know it’s felt like hijab month here at Feministe, and that might be getting irritating, as the hijab is really not the biggest issue facing women world-wide, and the Western obsession with it is fairly obnoxious. My only defense is that (1) I’m taking a class that I really love and we’re talking about the hijab this week, so I’m reading a lot about it and I think it’s interesting, and (2) the niquab issue in England has been raised recently, and it’s been generating a lot of controvery.

My professor sent out this article about veiling written by a former nun. She presents a unique perspective, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing. An excerpt:

They argue that you do not have to look western to be modern. The veiled woman defies the sexual mores of the west, with its strange compulsion to “reveal all”. Where western men and women display their expensive clothes and flaunt their finely honed bodies as a mark of privilege, the uniformity of traditional Muslim dress stresses the egalitarian and communal ethos of Islam.

Muslims feel embattled at present, and at such times the bodies of women often symbolise the beleaguered community. Because of its complex history, Jack Straw and his supporters must realise that many Muslims now suspect such western interventions about the veil as having a hidden agenda. Instead of improving relations, they usually make matters worse. Lord Cromer made the originally marginal practice of veiling problematic in the first place. When women are forbidden to wear the veil, they hasten in ever greater numbers to put it on.

Thoughts?

Every Mother’s Son

Here’s the backstory on Michael Sandy’s murder from the New York Times and the Blade.

From the Blade:

Michael Sandy, 29, logged onto the Internet Sunday night, Oct. 8, and got lucky—he met someone. A guy who went by the screen name “Fireyefox” asked him to meet in a parking lot in Plum Beach, Brooklyn.

Only Sandy wasn’t lucky. It was a setup. A group of young men allegedly planned to rob Sandy. They beat him and chased him into nearby traffic on the Belt Parkway, according to reports, where he was struck by a car. The driver did not stop. And the assailants beat Sandy again along the side of the road.

Sandy, a gay African American, was hospitalized in critical condition until Friday, Oct. 13, when his family took him off life support and he died.

“We are actively and aggressively seeking hate crimes murder against three people,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. He said they are investigating a fourth person.

John Fox, 19, and Ilye Shurov, 20, both of Sheepshead Bay, and Gary Timmins, 16, are charged in the case.

From fastlad’s post:

Michael Sandy wasn’t anyone I knew, yet my response was heartfelt: not even 30, seeking a simple human connection, even braving streets where he wasn’t welcome, to be betrayed, beaten, and run to ground by a pack of thugs.

Boy, that sounds familiar. But look how it plays:

Michael was responding to an internet hook up. He went to a historically racist neighborhood to do it. It was racism. It was homophobia. It was unfortunate. It was stupid.

Next.

That’s the reason for the ostentatiously muted response from community leaders: He was looking for sex, he was gay.

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The Good Body

And here I thought it was sex that made a woman lose “the flower of her body.” How foolish. Everyone knows that it’s during pregnancy when women go from being acceptably fuckable objects to vessels which no longer exist solely for male pleasure (now they exist for promulgation of the male seed, obviously) and are therefore not worthy of fucking. Or something.

Despite Charles Mudede’s bizarre assertion that “if a woman’s pregnancy is far along the way, having sex with her must mean having sex with the baby” (I think someone needs to repeat 7th grade biology), I can’t help but suspect that perhaps his argument hinges on the ever-popular view that women’s bodies exist solely for male use and definition. Charles Mudede doesn’t find pregnant bodies attractive because that body has run its course of usefulness in his life — it’s been “used up,” as he pleasantly phrases it:

The body that had the sex that resulted in the pregnancy is not the same as the body that is in the process of producing a whole new life. The first body was attractive (like a flower is attractive); the pregnant body, on the other hand, is used up by the function of the pregnancy.

Because Charles doesn’t find the pregnant body attractive, the pregnant body is objectively not attractive. Because Charles views women’s bodies as means to an end (first for his sexual pleasure, then for birthing “his” child, and useless thereafter), women’s bodies are a means to an end.

Entitled much?

And any of you who think differently are just fooling yourselves. Plus, you’re having inauthentic sex if you’re fucking while pregnant.

He does have a point about the sheer hideousness of pregnant women, though. What beasts:

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Posted in Sex