Too much good stuff, not enough time to write individual posts. Here’s what’s going on lately:
1. Two domestic violence cases reaching the Supreme Court right now could make it much more difficult to bring abusers to justice. The cases raise the question of whether tapes of 911 calls are admissible as evidence. This is crucial in DV cases, as often the victim is too scared to testify, wants to drop the charges or is threatened with further violence.
Domestic violence accounts for up to 34 percent of all reported violent crimes, but it is notoriously difficult to prosecute, because victims frequently drop charges or refuse to testify when their abusers threaten them with further violence. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the refusal of victims to cooperate in the prosecution of their batterers may have resulted in the dismissal of as many as 70 percent of all domestic violence cases.
In recent years, however, prosecutors, police officers and advocates for domestic violence victims have developed techniques, together known as “evidence-based prosecution,” that focus on the use of reliable evidence, like 911 tapes, to build cases that do not depend on the cooperation of the victim. In San Diego, the City Attorney’s domestic violence unit uses evidence-based prosecution, and it obtains convictions in about 88 percent of its cases. In a typical six month period in the old days, the unit’s conviction rate was just 12 percent.
But the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to DV prosecuters when the issued restrictions on the use of 911 tapes. These two cases deal with nuances in defining those restrictions, and if the court decides to tighten the law, domestic violence crimes will be incredibly difficult to prosecute. Keep an eye on this one.
2. This one is only in TimesSelect now because it’s a week old, but here’s some solid evidence that women aren’t opting out of careers. Plus, they link to Feministe at the bottom, and I like that.
3. Yay for Amazon.com. They fixed their search function so that when you search for “abortion,” you no longer get the response, “Did you mean adoption?”
4. The Grey Lady doesn’t care so much for the ladies, apparently. And that supposed bastion of liberalism isn’t exactly a diehard pro-choice rag.
The past two years have seen one of the most contentious and closely watched presidential contests in 40 years, the retirement of the first female Supreme Court justice, the appointment of two new justices, and an attempted Senate filibuster against one of them specifically because of liberal concerns about how he would vote on choice issues. And during that period, not one op-ed discussing abortion on the op-ed page of the most powerful liberal paper in the nation was written by a reproductive-rights advocate, a pro-choice service-provider, or a representative of a women’s group.
On the other hand, we’ve had op/eds about men’s “abortion rights” at least twice that I can think of, and a series from anti-choice men.
Instead, the officially pro-choice New York Times has hosted a conversation about abortion on its op-ed page that consisted almost entirely of the views of pro-life or abortion-ambivalent men, male scholars of the right, and men with strong, usually Catholic, religious affiliations. In fact, a stunning 83 percent of the pieces appearing on the page that discussed abortion were written by men.
And it’s not just the op/ed page.
A Prospect examination of the authors published between late February 2004 and late February 2006 found that 90 percent of writers — including staff columnists — who discussed abortion on the Times op-ed page over the past two years were male. These men wrote 83 percent of the op-eds that mentioned abortion.
Even more surprising, more op-eds that mentioned abortion in the Times were written by pro-life men than by women of any belief system.
And what about expert voices — you know, the people doing the politicking and the actual procedures? Disproprortionately women, and thoroughly absent.
Over the past two years, voices from NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Organization for Women, EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were entirely absent from the public conversation about abortion on the Times opinion pages. Pro-choice female academics, authors, and religious leaders were also largely shut out when it came to the topic of choice — as were pro-life or abortion-ambivalent women.
Indeed, what’s most striking about today’s op-ed page is the absence of women of any sort writing on the subject of abortion. Of the 124 mentions of abortion on the page over the two-year period, only 21 of those instances were female authored. In total, there were 67 authors who wrote about abortion for the Times — only seven of which were female. (Many authors wrote multiple columns mentioning the topic.) That’s seven women over two years, compared with 60 men.
5. Speaking of women writing about abortion, check out Abortion lessons from Latin America, written by a fabulous woman who I used to work with at Human Rights Watch.
Abortion is illegal in most countries in Central and South America, though the law waives criminal penalties for women who have abortions in certain circumstances: after rape or incest or if their life or health is endangered by the pregnancy. Over the last five years, I have interviewed dozens of women and girls who faced unwanted pregnancies and had abortions in Argentina, Mexico and Peru, all countries that limit access to contraceptives, sex education and abortion. The most common tale I heard was one of desperation.
“I don’t have $10 a month for contraceptives — I need that money for milk for my children.” “I didn’t even want to have sex, let alone become pregnant.” “If I have this child, I won’t be able to take care of the others.” “My father raped me.” The list goes on.
Marianne offers up the three main lessons she’s learned from her work in Latin America:
Lesson 1: Outlawing abortion does not stop women from having them. “What do I care if abortion is legal or illegal?” Marcela E. told me in 2004 in Argentina, where abortion generally is banned. “If I have to do it, I have to do it.” The 32-year-old mother of three had a clandestine abortion after her husband raped her.
A community organizer in Argentina told me: “You will not believe what women end up putting in their uteruses to abort.” I wish I didn’t.
I have spoken to women who used knives, knitting needles, rubber tubes, even pieces of wood to pry open their uteruses. Some got access to abortive medicines that in theory lower the possibility of direct infection but that caused serious complications when they took them without medical assistance. Affluent women suffered fewer traumatic ordeals, often traveling to the U.S. for the procedure or sneaking off to upscale private Latin America clinics where, on paper, they had surgery for appendicitis.
The rich, naturally, will have better access than the poor, but even they are not immune.
Lesson 2: Providing limited exceptions to an abortion ban does little to improve access to safe abortions.
In reality very few, if any, women get such “non-punishable” abortions because there are no clear procedures. Fearing that they’d be charged with a crime, many of the women I interviewed who might have qualified for a legal abortion because they had been raped or because their health was endangered by the pregnancy did not dare to out themselves as potential abortion candidates. They went straight for the illegal and mostly unsafe back-alley abortions. A large proportion of maternal mortality in Latin America is caused directly by the consequences of such unsafe abortions.
Indeed, in some Latin American countries as many as one in three hospital beds are filled with women who underwent botched abortion procedures.
Lesson 3: In Latin America, as everywhere else, the best way to stop abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Women and girls act within the circumstances imposed upon them. In Latin America, where contraceptives are inaccessible and sex is stigmatized (through cultural expectations that they be virginal and uneducated about sex), unwanted pregnancies are more common; not surprisingly, there is a higher proportion of abortions to pregnancies than in, for example, the U.S. The simple fact is that women with unwanted or imposed pregnancies would have preferred not to need abortions.
This, I should think, would be obvious. But we still have conservative “pro-life” lawmakers cutting state funding for contraception, blocking EC from being available over the counter, and limiting accurate sexual health education, all of which increase the abortion rate. Because… we love babies?
6. I really dislike Meghan Daum, and I don’t exactly love her column comparing Kate O’Beirne’s ridiculous screed Women Who Make the World Worse with Karenna Gore Schiff’s apparently snooze-worthy Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America, but it’s worth reading if only for the fact that (1) it points out the borderline anti-Semitism of the depictions of Sarah Jessica Parker and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the cover of O’Beirne’s book, and (2) it criticizes the placement of any book about women in a “special interest” section. The rest of the column is an unfortunate description of a roller derby cat-fight and a series of incomplete thoughts.
Slightly off-topic, but the LA Times editorial pages are really getting sad. On one hand, they have some of the better contributing op/ed writers, and I often prefer their contributing pieces to many of those published in the NY Times. But their columnists suck. Meghan Daum is just one example. Joel Stein is funny, Niall Ferguson is occassionally interesting, but I generally skip the columnists all together. Even Jonah Goldberg, who you’d think would at least be good for getting me all riled up, seems to have the life sucked out of him at that paper. They need a serious overhaul.
7. Iraqi women speak out about the grave consequences the U.S. occupation has caused in their lives.
Three years ago this month, Vivian Salim Mati drove with her family from their Baghdad home toward the airport highway to escape a bombing raid. As they were leaving the city, an American tank fired on them without warning. Mati recalls seeing the soldier shooting bullets from the top of the tank. Within moments, her husband, her two sons, her daughter and her mother-in-law were shot dead in the car. Mati received neither explanation from occupation forces nor compensation for her loss.
Earlier this year Mati decided to join a delegation of Iraqi women to visit the United States and recount her experiences in the war. Mati traveled the dangerous route from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, to obtain her US visa. However, her visa was denied on the grounds that she might overstay her visit because she lacked “sufficient family ties that would compel her to return” to Iraq. Her fellow delegates, who recounted this story, felt it especially grievous that the US government cited Mati’s lack of family–deaths for which America was responsible–to explain why she could not enter the country.
Women’s activism has long centered around the idea that “the personal is political,” and while that phrase is certainly over-used and perhaps tired, I think it’s particularly applicable here. What happens in our individual lives is part of a greater social web, and is inherently intertwined with political decisions. That isn’t to say that the grief of individuals automatically means that any war is invalid, or that anecdotes should be the basis for political moves. But experience matters, and when making decisions and evaluating our political choices, it is crucial to look at the human elements involved.
8. Three women who made the world better.
9. Feminists need to take on race issues. I just read Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class this week, and would highly recommend it as a primer to this conversation.
10. TV loves the “housewife.” The housewife, of course, is white, rich, and a total babe who doesn’t have much to do but lounge around, gossip, and have sex. Which is awesome, because (a) it reinforces stereotypical ideas of the lazy bon-bon-eating housewife (a word I hate), (b) it reminds us that, at their core, women are generally selfish and shallow, and (c) it tells us that the only women worth looking at or being interested in are these sexbots — but they’re married sexbots, and so that makes it better. Ugh.
11. “Manliness” is reviewed (hilariously) in the New York Times. A must-read.
Remember those great old “Saturday Night Live” bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to “pump you up” while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words “girly” and “manly” — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?
Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn’t. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of “Manliness” (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that’s happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of “manly” than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like “Though it’s clear that women can be manly, it’s just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men.” A time warp where it’s further possible — in a passage on the sexes’ characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit.
12. Noted family-wrecker Barbara Ehrenreich challenges Kate O’Beirne to support family-friendly work policies. I won’t hold my breath.
13. If I ever have daughters, I will send them to Bette Midler’s Diva Boot Camp. Dang, I wish I could go.