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

Month: February 2011

Standing with Planned Parenthood

This week, the anti-choice group Live Action released a series of (often heavily edited) videos where an actor posing as a pimp and actresses posing as sex workers went into Planned Parenthood clinics asking for care. Their story made it sound like the fake sex workers were underage and the victims of human trafficking. They visited a dozen clinics, and clinic workers did exactly what they’re supposed to: They told the girls about their legal rights to health care and privacy, they offered them health care resources, and then they not only reported the visits to the local police and the FBI, but contacted Attorney General Eric Holder. One Planned Parenthood employee, of the dozens who were targeted in this sting operation, didn’t follow protocol and was fired as soon as PP found out — even at that PP center, though, the visit was reported to law enforcement.

Live Action says that the videos reveal an “endemic problem” at Planned Parenthood. Jill Stanek, to whom I am not going to link, quotes Live Action founder Lila Rose as saying:

“It is utterly disgusting that Planned Parenthood’s response to this is that their employee reacted ‘professionally,’” said Live Action President Lila Rose. “The only acceptable response to encountering a self-identified sex-trafficker of underage girls is zero tolerance. The only ‘professional’ response is to immediately call law enforcement to the scene and push for an arrest.

Our investigation – and their response – continues to show that an institutional crisis has engulfed the highest levels of PP. If you’re a sex-trafficker of minors or young women, you have a partner in PP. But if you are a minor or a young woman, you are not safe at PP clinics,” Rose continued.

Yeah, but no. I understand that Rose has an agenda, but calling local police in, say, Falls Church, Virginia to deal with what may be an international sex ring involving underage girls, and demanding that they come immediately and make arrests? Is really, really not the way to deal with trafficking situations. The outcome there is arresting the girls, ensuring that sex workers will not use Planned Parenthood’s very necessary services in the future, and giving the traffickers notice so that they can hide their tracks. The best thing that a health care worker can do in that situation is to do their job — to give their patient the health care they’re seeking within the confines of the law — and then to report the situation to law enforcement agencies that will be able to coordinate a comprehensive, sensitive and effective response.

The real story here, though, is how Live Action has made a years-long effort to take down Planned Parenthood. Lila Rose is an anti-choice extremist who thinks that if abortions are legal, they should be “done in the public square” so we can all see what they’re about (I wonder if she would say the same thing about, say, sex between married Christians?). She has collaborated with James O’Keefe (the guy who tapped Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone and attempted to entrap a CNN reporter) on various anti-PP stings, with remarkably little success. She’s dishonest and thoroughly unethical, and the message she’s attaching to these latest videos is, basically, “Planned Parenthood employees will help girls get birth control, STI tests and abortions without telling their parents.” Which, yeah, is true! And totally legal! And should be legal!

It’s pathetic, but the media is biting, and anti-choice congressmen are pushing bills that would cut federal funds to Planned Parenthood because of PP’s status as an abortion provider. But more than 90 percent of the services offered by Planned Parenthood are preventative; abortion makes up a tiny fraction of what the organization does. PP provides contraception for nearly 2.5 million patients every year; four million tests and treatments for STIs, including HIV; nearly one million life-saving screenings for cervical cancer; and more than 830,000 breast exams. One in four American women has received care from Planned Parenthood. I certainly have — I was able to get an annual exam and contraception for free at a time when I didn’t have insurance. I was very thankful that PP was there when I needed them.

The efforts by Live Action aren’t intended to make Planned Parenthood better, to keep them accountable; they aren’t intended to help trafficking victims or women and girls. They are explicitly purposed to make Planned Parenthood and its employees “not feel safe.” The point is to take away health care from women and girls — not just because Lila Rose and her team dislike abortion, but because they oppose reproductive care generally. They’re against women having access to birth control. They’re against women and men having access to STI testing. They’re against anything that recognizes the reality that people have sex, usually before marriage, and not everyone thinks they should be punished for that sin. They’re against, essentially, any responsible decision-making or self-care when it comes to sex, because that might mean that people could actually enjoy their sexuality outside of the confines of what anti-choice extremists believe to be appropriate.

So they try to punish everyone, and take away basic health care access. It’s disgusting and it’s offensive, and they’re trying to shift the media narrative by claiming that Planned Parenthood helps human traffickers. Planned Parenthood helps all of its patients, regardless of their status. If these fake sex workers were actually trafficked girls, Planned Parenthood’s actions would have helped them much more significantly than Lila Rose’s suggestion to call the local cops and demand arrests. This attack is pathetic, but it’s gotten some traction. Don’t let it. Stand with Planned Parenthood.

New bill will let doctors refuse to save the lives of pregnant women

Sometimes there really aren’t words for what passes as “pro-life” in the United States. The “Protect Life Act” overrides the requirement that ER doctors treat every patient and do what’s necessary to save the patient’s life, regardless of the patient’s identity or ability to pay — the Act allows doctors to refuse necessary care to a pregnant woman if that care will kill the fetus.

In other words, it gives doctors the green light to let pregnant women die if they have a life-threatening condition and need an emergency abortion. We know that women’s lives have been saved by abortion (and that some number of people don’t approve of the whole life-saving thing). It’s not surprising that a few religious blow-hards think it’s better for women to die instead of receiving therapeutic abortions, but to encode the view that you don’t have to save a pregnant woman’s life into federal law? That is truly sick — and shockingly cruel, even for the usual “pro-life” suspects who regularly use their ideology as a tool to punish women.

Also? It’s not like letting the pregnant woman die saves the fetus, so there’s no “protecting life” here. When the woman dies, the fetus dies too. The entire purpose of this bill is to allow ideologues to refuse necessary, life-saving care to patients, if those patients happen to be pregnant. It’s disgusting. I hope, at the very least, that this will be widely publicized, and will show the rest of the country what a far-right “culture of life” really looks like — it’s not particularly life-affirming to anyone with a uterus.

Thanks to Amanda for the heads up.

Quotations

Nicholas Kristof isn’t necessarily my favorite person to turn to in times of major human rights crises, but:

Mr. Mubarak has disgraced the twilight of his presidency. His government appears to have unleashed a brutal crackdown — hunting down human rights activists, journalists and, of course, demonstrators themselves, all while trying to block citizens from Tahrir Square. As I arrived near the square in the morning, I encountered a line of Mr. Mubarak’s goons carrying wooden clubs with nails embedded in them. That did not seem an opportune place to step out of a taxi, so I found a back way in.

So did many, many others. At Tahrir Square’s field hospital (a mosque in normal times), 150 doctors have volunteered their services, despite the risk to themselves. Maged, a 64-year-old doctor who relies upon a cane to walk, told me that he hadn’t been previously involved in the protests, but that when he heard about the government’s assault on peaceful pro-democracy protesters, something snapped.

So early Thursday morning, he prepared a will and then drove 125 miles to Tahrir Square to volunteer to treat the injured. “I don’t care if I don’t go back,” he told me. “I decided I had to be part of this.”

“If I die,” he added, “this is for my country.”

He knows how to get those anecdotes. And, damn. It’s beautiful, these small scenes, in the face of such ugliness and oppression.

Take Action for Egypt

If you haven’t been following the protests in Egypt, it’s time to start paying attention. The situation has escalated significantly in the past 24 hours, with pro-Mubarak thugs attacking protesters and blocking journalists and human rights workers from the scene.

There is no reliable way of knowing right now how many have been killed and injured in Egypt’s turmoil. Before Wednesday’s violence, Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said the death toll could be as many as 300, but she acknowledged that she was basing that on “unconfirmed” reports. There are some who are missing, including a senior Google official, Wael Ghonim, who supported the democracy activists. On Wednesday, the government said that three more had died and many hundreds were injured; I saw some people who were unmoving and looked severely injured at the least. These figures compare with perhaps more than 100 killed when Iran crushed its pro-democracy movement in 2009 and perhaps 400 to 800 killed in Beijing in 1989.

Chinese and Iranian leaders were widely condemned for those atrocities, so shouldn’t Mr. Mubarak merit the same broad condemnation? Come on, President Obama. You owe the democracy protesters being attacked here, and our own history and values, a much more forceful statement deploring this crackdown.

It should be increasingly evident that Mr. Mubarak is not the remedy for the instability in Egypt; he is its cause. The road to stability in Egypt requires Mr. Mubarak’s departure, immediately.

Al Jazeera is a great source of news on the Egypt protests.

The situation in Egypt is dire. Please call the State Department comment line (202 647 6575) to express support for the pro-democracy movement in Egypt, and encourage the Obama administration to demand that Mubarak step down now.

Thanks to Kristin for the post suggestion.

FNTT Season 7, Round 2: Comrad vs. Atrollbro vs. Mr. RJ

Round Two of the seventh season of Feministe’s Next Top Troll is still underway. Today, vote for your favorite between three winners of their respective Round One brackets. The victor will go on to Round Three, and will be one step closer to winning the crown of Feministe’s Next Top Troll.

Read More…Read More…

Thank you, Jessica

Jessica Valenti announced today that she’s leaving Feministing. She writes:

I started Feministing almost seven years ago (wow) to provide a space for younger feminists who didn’t have a platform. I was a 25 year-old who found it profoundly unfair that an elite few in the feminist movement had their voices listened to, and that the work of so many younger women went misrepresented or ignored altogether.

Today, almost 5,000 posts later, I’m a 32 year-old feminist with a voice that is listened to. Largely because of the work I’ve done with Feministing, I have a successful platform for my work – I’ve published books, written articles, and built a career as a speaker. Because I feel Feministing should remain a place for younger feminists to build their careers and platforms, I think it’s appropriate to our mission that I step back.

It takes a big woman to step aside from a project that she created and nurtured and built from the ground up. And Jessica did build Feministing into the biggest feminist community on the interwebs; she has also, through her seven years at the site, been instrumental in raising the profiles of many more young feminist writers, and giving a platform and a voice to hundreds of young women.

I met Jessica soon after she started Feministing, when I was writing a now-long-gone blogspot blog, which I started after regularly reading (and arguing on) a conservative classmate’s blog. When I started writing online, I had never read a feminist blog; I had no idea that there were other feminist blogs out there. After a few months of writing, I came across Feministing; a few months after that, I met Jessica and Vanessa at a Feministing get-together in the East Village, and my experience on the internet was never the same. Feminist blogging, I’ve said many times before, taught me more about feminism and women’s experiences than four years of academic gender studies coursework. Seven years of reading and writing about feminism online has been exceptionally fulfilling, if often frustrating and sometimes painful. Jessica was the first person I met who believed that online community-building was the future of feminism; she was the first person who, back in 2005, told me it was awesome that I was 20 and had a bright-pink website where I mostly wrote about abortion. She was also the first person to tell me that I should think bigger than just the blog — that I should pitch to the Guardian; that HuffPo was looking for more female writers; that I should submit a panel idea to a blogging conference that had been pretty dude-heavy the year before.

What struck me most about Jessica when I first met her, and what she was so good at in her time at Feministing, was her unflagging support of other women and feminist writers. Despite her status as the founder and de facto “star” of Feministing, she made conscientious efforts to raise the profiles of dozens of other writers. She turned down all kinds of opportunities, opting instead to suggest that another woman take her place. She links and quotes and sources liberally, on Feministing and in her books. She has been, for me personally, a source of support and mentorship.

I feel like I’m writing about Jessica like this is an obituary, when obviously it is not. She’s still writing at her personal site, and is working on a book about parenthood. But it is the end of an era — very few of us who were doing the feminist blogging thing when it was brand-new (and when it was still kind of embarrassing to admit you were a “blogger”) are the “young feminists” we were almost a decade ago. I admire Jessica for passing the torch, while continuing her amazing work in different venues. And I’m excited to see the work that the current and future Feministing writers and editors produce.

Congratulations, Jessica, on the next steps. And thanks for everything.