February 2008 – Page 14

I post this only to get Bill Donahue’s goat.

Apparently Catholic League professional tight-ass Bill Donahue is pissed off at an Equinox ad that depicts nuns sketching a naked man. And, you know, as a good feminist I’m anti-objectification and anti-making-fun-of-nuns and whatnot, but (a) I don’t think this is making fun of nuns, it’s just kind of silly, (b) I am very pro- Hot Semi-Naked Dude, and (c) [insert intelligent commentary about the Male Gaze and the differing feminist takes on gendered objectification here]. Plus, I support most things that get Bill Donahue riled up.

So if you’re interested in hot man-ass, peek below the fold.

Why I Am An Abortion Provider

A must-read article:

I have been an abortion provider since 1972. Why do I do abortions, and why do I continue to do abortions, despite two murder attempts?

The first time I started to think about abortion was in 1960, when I was in secondyear medical school. I was assigned the case of a young woman who had died of a septic abortion. She had aborted herself using slippery elm bark.

I had never heard of slippery elm. A buddy and I went down to skid row, and without too much difficulty, purchased some slippery elm bark to use as a visual aid in our presentation. Slippery elm is not sterile, and frequently contains spores of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. It is called slippery elm because, when it gets wet, it feels slippery. This makes it easier to slide slender pieces through the cervix where they absorb water, expand, dilate the cervix, produce infection and induce abortion. The young woman in our case developed an overwhelming infection. At autopsy she had multiple abscesses throughout her body, in her brain, lungs, liver and abdomen.

I have never forgotten that case.

After I graduated from University of British Columbia medical school in 1962, I went to Chicago, where I served my internship and Ob/Gyn residency at Cook County Hospital. At that time, Cook County had about 3,000 beds, and served a mainly indigent population. If you were really sick, or really poor, or both, Cook County was where you went.

The first month of my internship was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it’s hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.

About 90% of the patients were there with complications of septic abortion. The ward had about 40 beds, in addition to extra beds which lined the halls. Each day we admitted between 10-30 septic abortion patients. We had about one death a month, usually from septic shock associated with hemorrhage.

I will never forget the 17-year-old girl lying on a stretcher with 6 feet of small bowel protruding from her vagina. She survived.

I will never forget the jaundiced woman in liver and kidney failure, in septic shock, with very severe anemia, whose life we were unable to save.

Today, in Canada and the U.S., septic shock from illegal abortion is virtually never seen. Like smallpox, it is a “disappeared disease.”

Read it all. It is brave and it is good.

Plans

Supposedly everyone agrees that we need to lower the teen pregnancy rate. But when we take a look at what the plans actually entail, we see what the “pro-life” movement actually stands for. First, the Dems:

Both Obama and Clinton have backed and continue to support increasing spending on what they call comprehensive family planning programs, sometimes also called “abstinence plus.” These give information on abstinence, abortion, contraception and Plan B or the morning-after pill that can prevent pregnancy after sex.

Clinton and Obama are co-sponsors of the main Democratic family planning bill, the Prevention First Act, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., early last year. It would increase funding by $100 million the approximately $300 million spent annually by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for family planning and sex education.

The Obama campaign also stresses his bill, the Communities of Color Teen Prevention Act, introduced last year, to spend $65 million annually in grants to lower pregnancy rates among Latino and African-American teenagers.

Both strongly emphasize that they will appoint federal judges who will uphold abortion rights and both endorse the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill to ensure legal abortions remain available. Both also say they will push for health insurance plans to cover prescription contraception.

So: Comprehensive sex education. Contraception. Abstinence. Abortion rights. The very things that have been proven time and again to decrease the abortion rate — they just need to add in comprehensive social welfare policies (like childcare and aid to low-income families) and universal health care.

The Republicans?

Republicans have not put out detailed agendas, but support continued federal funding of abstinence programs. Huckabee and Romney pursued abstinence-only funding as governors. McCain voted in the Senate against expanding family planning programs with contraception education.

Huckabee has been outspoken about his support for abstinence education as the best approach to teen pregnancy, and his commitment to overturning the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court legalizing abortion. In responding to a query from the Christian Broadcast Network last year, he said, “I do not believe in teaching about sex or contraception in public schools. That is the responsibility of parents.”

Last February, McCain spoke of overturning Roe v. Wade before an abstinence rally in South Carolina, but he did not detail specific plans to reduce teen pregnancy. On his Web site, he says he favors adoption and will work to reduce abortions. “The pro-life movement has done tremendous work in building and reinforcing the infrastructure of civil society,” his Web site reads. “This work must continue and government must find new ways to empower and strengthen these armies of compassion.”

Romney, as the governor of Massachusetts, sought to provide federal abstinence-only education grants for programs in African-American and Latino communities. He told the Family Research Council’s Voter Values conference last fall that teen pregnancy is tied to the breakdown of the traditional family. He believes in incentives to encourage marriage and penalties to fathers who do not support their children.

“One of the biggest threats to the fabric of our society is out-of-wedlock childbirth. Ann and I will use the bully pulpit to teach America’s children that before they have babies, they should get married. It’s time to make out-of-wedlock births out-of-fashion again,” he said.

He stressed his support for an overturn of Roe v. Wade and favors returning the decision over abortion legality to the states.

And Republicans have… outlawing abortion and telling people to keep their legs closed until they’re married. The very things that never work. And they oppose the measures that have been proven to decrease the abortion rate. Because they’re pro-life like that.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

I still haven’t seen it, but Ms. Lauren gives it rave reviews. There’s an interview with the director, Cristian Mungiu, in the LA Weekly, and he makes a few comments I’d like to highlight. Mungiu says,

It didn’t start from the idea of making a film about abortion. I hope that it speaks about this period and how people adapted, as you say. And I also hope it speaks about something that is not just connected with that period. For me, it’s also a film about responsibilities and decision making, and I think these are things which are very universal, and I believe that is why there is this sympathy for the film in lots of places. Even in places where people don’t know much about what was going on in Romania, people still relate to this.

The same-sex marriage train rolls on

Yay! A New York state appellate court in Rochester has ruled that same-sex marriages solemnized in foreign countries (such as Canada) must be recognized in New York State:

The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court on Friday reversed a judge’s ruling in 2006 that Monroe Community College did not have to extend health benefits to an employee’s lesbian partner.

Patricia Martinez, a word processing supervisor, sued the school in 2005, arguing that it granted benefits to heterosexual married couples but denied them to Martinez and her partner, Lisa Ann Golden.

The couple formalized their relationship in a civil union ceremony in Vermont in 2001 and were married in Canada in 2004.

The college refused to add Golden to the health care benefits because its contract with the Civil Service Employees Association did not address benefits for same-sex partners. Since then, the contract has been enhanced to extend benefits to an employee’s domestic partner.

State Supreme Court Justice Harold Galloway dismissed Martinez’s lawsuit in August 2006, saying that the state does not recognize same-sex marriages. The state Legislature “currently defines marriage as limited to the union of one man and one woman,” he wrote.

The appellate judges disagreed, determining that there is no legal impediment in New York to the recognition of a same-sex marriage.

The state Legislature “may decide to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages solemnized abroad,” the ruling said. “Until it does so, however, such marriages are entitled to recognition in New York.”

Now, this is a very interesting ruling, because there *are* some same-sex marriages that have been recognized in New York; Massachusetts law does not give legal effect to marriages performed there where the state of residence of the couple prohibits the marriage, but couples who were married in Massachusetts between the date it was legalized there and the date when the New York Court of Appeals ruled that New York’s laws do not permit same-sex marriage have valid marriages because the law in New York was unsettled at the time. So, given that some marriages performed out of state are valid, it would be inequitable for others to be invalid. And really, the only reason that most same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts aren’t valid in New York is because of Massachusetts law — if they’re not valid in the couple’s home state at the time they’re performed, they’re simply not valid at all. But AFAIK, Canada has no such restrictions.

Great news!

You mean they can speak for themselves?

Palestinian feminists organize.

Hamas leader Mahmoud Az Zahar returned from the Cairo meetings via the Rafah crossing Saturday afternoon where a major demonstration was underway with thousands of people present and feminists leading the way. The women demanded that the Rafah border remain open under the new agreement, and that the previous agreement be abolished as it was deemed unfair to the Palestinian people.

I guess they must have gotten tired of sitting around waiting for us white ladies to come save them.

People of Gaza Still Starving

This is disgusting.

This Groundhog’s Day

I’ve been keeping to myself in a very unhealthy, bitter way lately. I’m battling a major depression and I think starting to pull out of it, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I’m a person who needs to believe that there is a purpose in life, even if I don’t believe in a higher power. I need to see the reason, the final result, of random events, try to tie them together. So I’m observing a sad, earth-shattering anniversary this weekend.

A year ago on Saturday my roommate and sort-of-adopted son Matthew died of a drug overdose. I was the one who found him. The repercussions of his death just keep on and on. I think to myself how wasteful it was. I think to myself that I have cried for a year. I think to myself that this is not just another statistic, another junkie overdose. It never is. It never is. The ways that the people we love touch us, and then leave us, especially when it doesn’t make sense, last forever.

What do you say about a man who wasn’t even 30 years old yet, who died in his bed with a needle in his arm? What do you say about the woman who knocked on his door to wake him up in the morning, only to get no response? What do you say about the children who didn’t understand? What do you say about a person who comes into your world, a person you immediately bond with, after you’ve been the witness to the most intimate moment of his existence? How do you live with waking up every morning with the image of him in your head?

He was an artist. He was a writer. He was so much, and so little in the end, this young man who threw it all away. And there are a million words I could say about him, there are a million ways I could memorialize him, from the altar in my room to his paintings on my wall, to the tears that come out of nowhere. But I think that in the end, at this point, Matthew would say to me that it’s time to move on, that I’ve hurt enough. So I take a deep breath. I hold his image for just a moment. I will come to a point where the sight of his coat or his shoes don’t make me break down. I will wake in the morning and not see him in his bed, in his room where he lived with me. I will be glad that he died in a home where he was loved, instead of on the Venice beach. I will remind myself that all the love in the world couldn’t stop him. I will take another deep breath and I will say it’s not right but it’s ok.

So finally, Matthew, goodbye. You are gone. Your ashes are gone, scattered, you are gone home to join your mom, you are ok now, I am ok, I will be ok, and we go on. And on we go.

Why I heart NY

Because you don’t even have to watch major sports games to know who wins — you can just sit in your apartment and you hear everyone either screaming and honking or groaning and booing as soon as it’s over.

I take it the Giants won tonight?

UPDATE 5 minutes later: This whole yelling/honking/ringing a cowbell thing could get old.

I once asked my German room mate what he thought of Americans. He considered it for a minute before responding, “You guys yell ‘Woo!‘ a lot.” That would appear to be accurate.

Feminist vs. Feminist

Jessica in the New York Times

Congrats to Jessica and Feministing for their prominent mention (and photo!) in the New York Times. Jessica has some great quotes. It’s unfortunate, though, that the article has to be about pitting second-wave feminists against younger feminists, and that it relies on some tired stereotypes (young feminists are flirty! And fun! And totally hot! And old feminists are scowling and boring).

Good on Jessica and New York State NOW President Marcia Pappas for staying above the fray and refusing to attack each other to fit into the journalist’s agenda.