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

Month: September 2007

The 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Give Healthcare to the Women-folk

A New York hospital may be scrapping its women’s health program — if it merges with a Catholic hospital. The women’s health program offers such Satan-affirming services as counseling, contraception and tubal ligation surgery.

Catholic hospital mergers are a significant issue across the country. Many, many previously secular hospitals have been forced to give up their women’s health care services after the mergers. But women can just go elsewhere for their health care, right? Sure. If there are other providers in your area. If your insurance covers those other providers. If the only medical care you ever need is planned ahead of time, and you never end up in the emergency room after, say, a sexual assault (emergency contraception is a Catholic no-no). And if you do need EC, you can just go to a different hospital, right? It’s simple. Just ask Joe Lieberman.

Quote of the Day

From Laura MacDonald:

And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.

First, Do No Harm

Jay has an excellent post up about the complexities of abortion, and how anti-choice politics and ideologies compromise women’s basic medical care. A taste:

“Any other pregnancies?”

Such a simple question. She was cuddling her five-week-old, happily describing how much help she had from her ten-year-old daughter. I could tell as soon as I asked that the answer wasn’t so simple. I could tell from the look on her face, from the hesitation as she answered me. I have learned to identify the body language of loss. I made sure I wasn’t clicking my pen, or tapping my foot, or in any other way expressing impatience. I waited quietly, openly, and after a minute she said “Well, I had an abortion a few years ago. And I pray every day to God to forgive me”.

I’m used to that, to women who believe the messages that they have failed themselves and their God by making this most difficult of choices. I’m used to hearing about the grief and guilt and the tears that show up every year on the day the baby would have been born. And no, this doesn’t happen to every woman who has an abortion and no, it’s not “post-abortion syndrome”. It’s the logical result of a traumatic experience brought on, at its root, a cult of motherhood and femininity that serves the patriarchy by demonizing women. I hate it – I am sickened by it – but I’m used to it. It was her next comment that stopped me cold:

“My last doctor told me I shouldn’t tell anyone that, even a doctor. He said I should say I had a miscarriage. But I didn’t, and I figured you need to know the difference. And you’re a doctor. Doctors aren’t supposed to judge people”.

No, they aren’t. Read Jay’s whole post. Doctors who tell women to lie about their past abortions threaten our physical and psychological health — they handicap future health care providers, and they reinforce the idea that abortion is the worst, most shameful thing you can do. Anti-choice doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other health care providers don’t just do harm when they refuse to provide basic reproductive health services; they do harm when they project their ideologies into the care they provide. As Jay says, doctors “can wound with our words as surely as with a scalpel.”

She follows up with another post about the Google searches that have lead people to her blog.

The search string was “can a doctor tell if you had an abortion”. The simple answer is “no”. A doctor doing a pelvic exam can tell if you’ve delivered a full-term baby vaginally, but a first- or second-trimester abortion doesn’t alter the cervix in the same way.

But that’s just the simple answer. Reading the question makes me sad and a little sick inside. I can feel her fear. Maybe she had an abortion in the past and is afraid that someone will find out. Will the doctor condemn her? Will the doctor tell her partner? Her parents? Her employer? Like my own patient, she may already be judging herself, may have been shamed by her culture or by a previous encounter with one of my colleagues. Not all women feel guilty after an abortion; many feel relieved, and many are ambivalent. But women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed don’t want to hide their history from their doctors.

I’d add that this extends to sex and reproduction in general. Women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed about the number of sexual partners they’ve had don’t hide their history from their doctors; women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed of having a sexually transmitted infection don’t hide their history from their doctors; women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed for having given birth and then given that child up for adoption don’t hide their history from their doctors; women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed of being sexually assaulted don’t hide that history from their doctors. Women who don’t feel guilty or ashamed of their sexual histories are able to provide their doctors with a more complete history, and get more narrowly-tailored, effective care.

Imagine what reproductive health care would look like if sexuality was viewed as both a pleasure and a responsibility, without guilt and without shame. Imagine if women weren’t inundated with images of themselves as sexual objects, if we looked outward instead of watching ourselves be watched. If women’s bodies weren’t visual representations of sex itself. If packaged-and-sold sex was trumped by the real thing — and if narrow moralizing and misogynist ideals weren’t hung on the real thing. If women weren’t trapped between Good Girls Don’t and Girls Gone Wild.

Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Jay has more on that end. In the meantime, I’m heartened to see responsible physicians like her offering thorough and compassionate care. (And I’ll just throw it out there that holy shit is Two Women Blogging an awesome site).

Bye, and Thanks!

I’ve had a lovely week here. Thanks to all for reading and discussing. I’m pleased to report that we’ve had a discussion on the porn thread that has been (so far) very interesting, by and large respectful, only-somewhat-rehash-y, moderately useful, and almost entirely asshat-free, all with a very very minimal amount of moderation. This is something that I’ve only been able to do before with people I know personally. That makes me rilly rilly happy and is a testament to the Feministe community. Thanks for welcoming me in.

Rosanne, signing off…

img_8692.jpgToday is my last day here on Feministe. I’d just like to offer my heartfelt thanks to Jill and the entire Feministe crew for inviting me to write for you.  And I’d like to thank all of you who have read my posts and stories.  I hope they gave you a little pleasure and perhaps something to think about.

 There are women, all over the world, living in rural areas with fascinating cultures.  It’s my wish that we don’t forget these women, their struggles and their lives.  That we honor their cultures, even if we don’t agree with how they’ve lived their lives or what politics they have followed.

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Growing Up Appalachian

img_8384.jpgThe Appalachian children are heartbreakingly beautiful. They start out all fat and chubby with apple cheeks and soon turn into little towheaded imps with wide snaggletooth smiles and baby lisps. It’s not surprising to me that there is still such an active private adoption market here. The paper usually has at least one ad for couples looking for babies from this area.

Growing as an Appalachian child and how you experience your childhood, very much depends on the family you grow up in. So in that, they are no different from the rest of us. But you can almost always be assured of having a large extended family surrounding you.

The old women have an odd contracted non-gendered pronoun that they use for infants. They use it more often than not when a child is sick or poorly. They will say, “Bless h’it’s heart, h’it were eat up with cradle cap.”

I’m not sure if contracting “it” into a non-gendered pronoun is a throwback from days when infant mortality was exceedingly high, but that would be my guess.

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All Katrina, All the Time

Paul Krugman has an excellent take on the Katrina anniversary:

Today, much of the Gulf Coast remains in ruins. Less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding, as opposed to emergency relief, has actually been spent, in part because the Bush administration refused to waive the requirement that local governments put up matching funds for recovery projects — an impossible burden for communities whose tax bases have literally been washed away.

On the other hand, generous investment tax breaks, supposedly designed to spur recovery in the disaster area, have been used to build luxury condominiums near the University of Alabama’s football stadium in Tuscaloosa, 200 miles inland.

But why should we be surprised by any of this? The Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina — the mixture of neglect of those in need, obliviousness to their plight, and self-congratulation in the face of abject failure — has become standard operating procedure. These days, it’s Katrina all the time.

Consider the White House reaction to new Census data on income, poverty and health insurance. By any normal standard, this week’s report was a devastating indictment of the administration’s policies. After all, last year the administration insisted that the economy was booming — and whined that it wasn’t getting enough credit. What the data show, however, is that 2006, while a good year for the wealthy, brought only a slight decline in the poverty rate and a modest rise in median income, with most Americans still considerably worse off than they were before President Bush took office.

Most disturbing of all, the number of Americans without health insurance jumped. At this point, there are 47 million uninsured people in this country, 8.5 million more than there were in 2000. Mr. Bush may think that being uninsured is no big deal — “you just go to an emergency room” — but the reality is that if you’re uninsured every illness is a catastrophe, your own private Katrina.

Yet the White House press release on the report declared that President Bush was “pleased” with the new numbers. Heckuva job, economy!

Read the whole thing. The Bush administrations complete re-writing of reality (and, following that, their refusal to deal with the reality at hand) is scary, dangerous and deadly.

From the special moderation queue

We have this comment on the post about a racist ad in the New York Times:

How exactly is this ‘racist’? It’s you goode PC lefty folks who are making the negro-monkey connection, not the ad.

Also, regarding racism and ‘empowerment’ of ‘minorities’ in general: be careful what you wish for. You might just get South Africa — or worse.

Ah yes. We’re the racist ones, not the lovely commenter who linked to an article about how South African black people are out of control, and how treating them like full citizens and human beings has created a national disaster. Trigger warning for the article: It has descriptions of ugly sexual assaults, and it’s chock-full of racist content. It says, no joke:

Verwoerd [“South Africa’s greatest post-war leader”] argued for apartheid – or ‘separate development’ – with great moral fervour. Whilst his priority was his own Afrikaner people, whom he saw as the standard-bearers of his country’s European identity, at the root of his outlook was the perception that South Africa’s multifarious peoples could only live in harmony if they lived apart. In view of what is happening now, who can say that he was wrong?

The article concludes with a hope that a national dialog about apartheid will be re-opened in South Africa.

But I’m the racist because I saw an ad where greedy poor people were portrayed as apes, and I made the connection to the long, long traditions of using monkeys and apes to represent people of color, and of stereotyping people of color as lazy, greedy and animalistic. There’s a lot more I could say about the South Africa article, but I’ll just let you all read it if you’re feeling like your blood pressure is too low.