Class – Page 3 – Feministe

Florida: Targeting the poor, refusing to protect children

Two new laws on the books in Florida: One to require drug tests for welfare recipients, and one that makes it illegal for doctors to ask patients about their firearms. Interesting priorities.

Testing welfare recipients for drugs is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, and a major privacy invasion. It’s been found unconstitutional in some circuits, since the 4th Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches. It’s a scary precedent to suggest that receiving public funds should leave you open to government invasion of your body. The argument in favor of drug testing seems to be, “Some people don’t deserve welfare.” Except, really, everyone deserves to eat and to have a roof over their heads — including drug users and addicts. If we want to help folks with addiction, the solution isn’t to make their lives harder and cut off their (already minimal) income source; it’s to fund social service programs for the poor, and make addiction treatment accessible and reasonable for low-income people. And as a practical point, if the goal is saving money, drug testing doesn’t do it — testing every welfare recipient is more expensive than maintaining aid without testing. But of course, this isn’t about saving money. It’s about targeting and punishing the poor.

Also on the Florida GOP target list? Children’s safety. Florida has passed a law preventing doctors from asking patients about their firearm ownership and use, which on its face sounds silly — why would your doctor ask you about your guns? — but is actually relatively important in pediatric care. As Dahlia Lithwick details:

The scuffle over “docs vs. Glocks” seems to have started when a pediatrician in Ocala asked the mother of a young child whether she kept guns in the home. She refused to answer because, as she put it, “whether I have a gun has nothing to do with the health of my child.” When the doctor told her to find another pediatrician, the women threatened to call a lawyer. Consider: According to a suit filed this week by the Brady Center, 65 children and teenagers are shot every day in America, and eight of them die; one-third of American homes with children under 18 have a firearms in them; and more than 40 percent of those households store their guns unlocked and a quarter of those homes store them loaded. What was it that mother said again? Oh, right, guns have nothing to do with the health of our children.
…
Pediatricians are trained—indeed, they are explicitly advised by the American Academy of Pediatrics—to inquire about the presence of open containers of bleach, swimming pools, balloons, and toilet locks in the homes of their patients. It’s part of their job to educate parents about potentially lethal dangers around the home. (Pediatricians have also been known to ask about menstruation, painful sex after childbirth, birth control, and the travails of potty training, all in the interest of patient well-being, by the way). So one might wonder why an inquiry about guns is the place to draw the line in the sand, the ultimate threat to personal privacy.

It’s not like pediatricians can take away your guns, but that’s what the NRA and the GOP seem to think — the NRA initially suggested that the punishment for violating the “no asking about guns” law should be prison time or a $5 million fine. Seems reasonable. I think we should institute the same punishment for wasting everyone’s time and money on stupid laws that actively harm the most vulnerable. The NRA alone could solve the U.S. debt crisis.

Assholery, like attractiveness, is usually subjective

Photo of Pan Grier — Objectively unattractive, right?

But sometimes, someone is objectively a total asshole. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist and the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, fits the bill. See, for example, his latest article in Psychology Today: “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

There are marked race differences in physical attractiveness among women, but not among men. Why?

Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

From these three scores, I can compute the latent “physical attractiveness factor” by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factor analysis has the added advantage of eliminating all random measurement errors that are inherent in any scientific measurement. The latent physical attractiveness factor has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

Recall that women on average are more physically attractive than men. So women of all races are on average more physically attractive than the “average” Add Health respondent, except for black women. As the following graph shows, black women are statistically no different from the “average” Add Health respondent, and far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.

Example 4865730 of why “evolutionary psychology” is mostly crap. Over and over again, it’s a way for scientists to look at a particular set of cultural preferences and make up a reason for why those preferences exist (spoiler: the reason is always “evolution,” and “evolution” is apparently tied quite closely to “things straight white American men like”).

Kanazawa uses the term “objectively attractive” a bunch of times in the article, but never explains what that actually means, or how certain traits can even be “objectively” attractive. As far as I can tell, study participants were asked to rate photos of individuals on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the most attractive). From there, Kanazawa concludes that (1) women are objectively more attractive than men, and (2) black women are objectively the least attractive women.

Which is fine if you don’t care about the meaning of the word “objective.”

Happy May Day!

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” -Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Hellraiser.

Here in the U.S. Labor Day is a muted affair celebrated at the end of the summer. It’s mostly lost its meaning to millions of people as anything other than the time at which kids go back to school and we stop wearing white. (Some of us.)

But around the world, the real labor celebration is May 1. International Workers’ Day began here in the U.S. when, 125 years ago, police opened fire on a protest at the West Randolph Street Haymarket in Chicago in favor of the 8-hour work day, after a dynamite bomb was thrown by an unknown person. Eight anarchists were arrested and four executed, not for any evidence that they threw the bomb but for their role as agitators.

Socialists and labor supporters around the world began celebrating May 1 as workers’ day, but in the U.S. Grover Cleveland feared the association with the history of the Haymarket Affair and endorsed the Labor Day we now know. But in more than 80 countries around the world, May 1 remains the true Labor Day.

We have seen this year once again that symbolism matters. We have seen right-wing governors not only attempting to suppress workers’ rights to organize, collectively bargain, and negotiate their wages and working conditions, but also taking down murals that celebrate the history of labor in this country.

We’ve also seen a resurgence in the labor movement at home–Wisconsin workers and allies 100,000 strong rallying day after day in their Capitol building and now gathering signatures and preparing to recall the state senators who voted to take away their rights. Beyond the symbolism of workers sleeping in sleeping bags in the Wisconsin winter outside the building, there’s been a resurgence of an awareness of history within the labor movement.

April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as he rallied with sanitation workers in Memphis, saw “We Are One” rallies around the country as labor and civil rights groups banded together to fight the latest onslaught against union workers.

And this May Day, Chicago will see a remembrance of the Haymarket Affair as well as rallies for immigrant workers. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will march with Milwaukee’s workers and immigrant community in a solidarity march that celebrates not only Wisconsin’s leadership role in the fight against union-busting state politicians (who are, it should be noted, not all Republicans), but also acknowledges the 2006 May Day rally in which millions marched in support of undocumented workers and defeated anti-immigrant legislation.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the founder and executive director of Voces de la Frontera, one of the groups organizing the Milwaukee rally, said:

“We want to send a message to corporate America, politicians and others that working people will not be divided,” she said.

Allison Kilkenny has more about rallies around the U.S., and the AFL-CIO has a liveblog and Twitter feed. If there’s no action in your neighborhood, help spread the word and stop dehumanizing immigrants with ColorLines’ “Stop the I-Word” campaign.

It’s about more than just symbolism, after all–it’s about organizing for right here, right now. Remembering the past, as Mother Jones said, is important, but the “fight like hell for the living” bit is the one that really matters. We want to build on history, not just nod our heads solemnly at it.

This year too, we learned once again the importance of international solidarity, as people around the world tuned in to Al-Jazeera English’s riveting live reporting from Egypt as that country peacefully threw off its dictator. Wisconsin protesters told reporters repeatedly that they were inspired by Tahrir Square to keep coming back each day to their own capitol, and Egyptians responded by sending messages of support (and pizza) to Madison. And just recently Egyptian activists joined U.S. activists here in New York to share advice and support–U.S. activists who were in turn inspired by the UK group UK Uncut to protest corporate power.

Egypt and Bahrain are two of the countries celebrating Labor day today even as they struggle for freedom.

Paul Mason of the BBC tweeted from Egypt’s May Day celebration today:

“Enjoy the revolution” says graffiti on Tahrir. They are. Tomorrow a Lab Party to be formed: doctors to vote on strike; new music evrywhere

In Moscow, 30,000 are expected to turn out–many to express dissatisfaction with their government as well as support for workers. In Turkey, 200,000 hit the streets in the largest rally since 1977, and in South Korea, 50,000 rallied. China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Spain, and Hong Kong also saw marches and actions.

In the UK, despite the Conservative government’s wishes to move the holiday away from a day associated with workers, May Day coincided with the royal wedding and thus got even more police overreaction than usual–at least in Brighton.

Internet organizing has gotten a lot of attention of late, particularly in relation to Egypt (and before that Iran), but May Day is a day to remember the importance of getting out in the streets. Facebook and Twitter can only take you so far.

We need our holidays to mark the past, to look to the future, and to fight for the rights of all. As Emma Goldman said:

“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Sarah Jaffe is web ninja at GRITtv, a writer and rabblerouser. Follow her on Twitter or Tumblr.

Frances Fox Piven Has a Posse

I’m enough of an Internet Personality that I’ve had some hate-tweeters and hate-bloggers in my time. Not a lot, but a few.

But I’ve never gotten as many straight-up nasty responses as when I tossed off a tweet Friday night that “Frances Fox Piven is tougher than you. Fact.”

See, Glenn Beck has it in for Frances Fox Piven.

And I was at the Left Forum for an opening plenary featuring my boss, the fabulous Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West and Paul Mason (of the BBC). And as a bonus, we got Frances Fox Piven.

The story of how a 78-year-old sociology professor and (brilliant) author became the number one enemy of The USA’s Weepiest TV Host has been told elsewhere. Nancy Goldstein wrote:

Glenn Beck must have thought he had an easy mark when he targeted Frances Fox Piven. Let’s face it. On paper she’s a female widowed lefty academic now approaching eighty. Most of her life’s work has been focused on enfranchising the poor through welfare reform and voter registration. Surely Beck thought that nearly fifty broadcasts worth of inflammatory disinformation and hate-mongering about Piven and their inevitable result—hate mail, comments and phone calls that range from brutally nasty and paranoid to those that cross the line into the genuine death threat category—would shut her up.

So what’s Frances Fox Piven up to that has Beck and his crew so terrified?

She, along with Cornel West, is organizing a massive teach-in on April 5, designed to help boost the movement, begun in Wisconsin (as Meredith Clark wrote right here) to push back on so-called “austerity” cuts.

In other words, she’s organizing. Frances Fox Piven has a posse.

I mean, maybe Beck & Co. should be scared. I hear his audience share is down, and those protests in Madison look like an awful lot of fun–free pizza donated from around the world sounds far better than tea to me.

Nonviolent mass activism is scary, I suppose, when your main interest in life is protecting the interests of those who are already doing just fine. And when you’d done a fairly good job of convincing people who have been struggling that you’re on their side already, you might as well spend a bit of time demonizing your opponents and consolidating your own power.

But that can backfire on you.

Eventually, when you make a huge deal out of a woman that the majority of the US had never heard of, night after night, some people might actually go read her books. And figure out that some of her ideas are pretty appealing. You know, that poor people should work together to leverage what power they have. That maybe while we still have mass unemployment, it’s time for the unemployed to organize instead of waiting around nicely for our corporate overlords to throw us a few jobs.

That a gutted social welfare system is leaving people, often women and children, unprotected when those jobs disappear.

That working-class people have rights, maybe, and are just as valuable as those with FOX News microphones.

Glenn Beck hasn’t been able to shut up Frances Fox Piven. Death threats haven’t shut her up. In between the nasty comments at my Twitter feed the other night, I got responses from her students, present and former. One of them said:

first thing she did in a class was slam her fist on the table and say “you don’t think you have power? you HAVE power.”

That’s what the Glenn Becks of the world are really afraid we’ll find out.

I got a button at that event that says “I Am Frances Fox Piven.” But I’m not. I’m nowhere near that fierce. I hope to be someday.

For now, count me as just part of the posse.

Hello Again, Feministe

She’s baaaaaaaack…

Jill asked me to help fill in for her while she’s traveling, and though I’m in no way a good replacement for Jill I agreed, even though I’m in sort of a strange head space around Feminist Blogging.

I haven’t been a regular blogger in a while–I was just in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive and someone asked me if I was a “blogger” with that odd note in his voice, the one I that I can never tell if it’s condescension or camaraderie. And I said, really, not so much anymore.

I mean, I maintain a Tumblr but I maintain a line in the sand rule about that blog–it is for me. I don’t owe anyone a post or a response or anything at all. I can ignore it for four days or post nothing but pictures of Robyn or Lauryn Hill. I’ll write long rambling posts that include references to period sex or one-liner abortion jokes.

I still consider myself a feminist, obviously–though lately I’m thinking more about bell hooks’ formulation “I advocate feminism” as a more active line to hold myself to. I’ve been doing maybe more straight-up feminist activism and plotting more work around the issues of abortion and women’s sexuality than ever before lately, and yet I’ve put some distance between myself and the feminist blogosphere.

Maybe because it so often seems to be having arguments we’ve had before. Or because I work too much and I’m busy writing things for people who pay me (I’m a journalist with a full-time job and entirely too much freelance work).

That sounds mean; I don’t mean it to be.

So I’m back here again, and though the server ate half my first post (Chally swears it hates her, not me, but I don’t believe it. Technology’s been out to get me this week.) I’ll be giving blogging a shot again, to see if I can remember what I liked about it so much for a while. To do some thinking out loud, in public, and see if we can’t get somewhere.

I’m not sure quite what I’ll write about yet–maybe about Frances Fox Piven and why Glenn Beck is scared of her; maybe about Wisconsin and Indiana and Ohio and why a resurgent union movement matters; maybe more about Robyn (there can never be enough Robyn).

I hope you have fun, whatever happens. Thanks for having me.

Why abortion funding matters

In the United States, federal funds do not pay for abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the pregnant woman’s life or health. Congressional Republicans are doing their best to get rid of even those narrow exceptions, and it’s crucial to sound the alarm about how hostile their bill is to rape survivors and women everywhere.

But even the status quo is pretty terrible for low-income women. The Hyde Amendment, which has been around for decades, limits federal Medicaid funding of abortion — so low-income women who rely on Medicaid for their health care have to pay for abortion out-of-pocket. “No taxpayer dollars for abortion” is a nice-sounding slogan, but the reality for women on the ground is that insufficient Medicaid funding means that an unwanted pregnancy is disastrous. Via Amanda, The National Network of Abortion Funds has collected the stories of women who have used their services, and the testimonials are heart-breaking. One example:

My son is 11 months old with a serious birth defect. He’s been in and out of intensive care for his whole life and has three or four doctor’s appointments every month. After he was born, I had to drop out of college and I lost my job because of all the appointments. My son’s medical care is covered by Medicaid, but it won’t cover my abortion.

How can I find the money for an abortion when there’s not enough for diapers? And how could I raise two babies when the one I have now needs all that I have to give?

I just moved to this state to live with my best friend and her baby. We thought that we could do better if we worked together, took care of each other.

But now I’ve already had to take money out of our grocery fund to put toward the cost of my abortion. My friend understands, but we’re going to be short on food money for a while. I borrowed money from some old classmates. I sold my television. I managed to scrape together what I needed. But when I got to the clinic, they told me that my abortion would cost $100 more.

$100 more than I had. $100 more than I could imagine finding.

There was no way I could go home without getting my abortion. So I sat down my diaper bag and started pulling things out – formula, bottles, diapers – to sell to the other women in the waiting room. Maybe I could raise that $100 right there.

Let’s keep up the #DearJohn work to make sure that the pool of women who cannot access abortion doesn’t get any bigger. But also consider donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds, to help women in need.

The Character of a City

Every so often, someone releases a list of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live. Here’s an ABC News article on one from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, listing the most unaffordable cities in the English-speaking world in relation to wages. My town is Sydney, ranking in second place.

I’ve been reflecting on what makes up a city – this city – when it’s so hard to live in it.

The Sydney property market (rental in particular) is notoriously vicious. There’s a musical about it this season, Open for Inspection, to illustrate. An unbelievable number of people will show up at every inspection, groups surging in the door for that fifteen minutes. This city has a reputation for being impersonal: it’s considered unusual to make eye contact and smile at strangers, and you’re considered to probably be out to steal from them if you do. (I mean, I’ve had shop assistants and cashiers look at me with shock and almost tearful gratefulness when I respond to a ‘hello, how’re you?’ with a ‘fine, thanks, and yourself?’) This kind of isolating menace is never more apparent than when it’s inspection time, from the powerplay around who gets in the door first, to who achieves the friendliest relationship with the real estate agent, to the little games around personal space. It’s a hard city in which to find somewhere affordable and liveable in which to place yourself, and it’s a big, unfriendly city. It is not expected that we be kind to one another.

Sydney is a city very much divided along class and ethnic lines. I am not sure how to explain to you how class works in Australia, because it seems to slip through a lot of the understandings used to explain class elsewhere, and also because I am from a middle class part of town. In some ways, Sydney’s like a group of bickering villages, really, with their ideas about the other, caricatures of uneducated, working class slobs and clueless private school snobs (as for the latter: accurate with disturbing frequency!). It’s such a large city that the more privileged groups get to stay in their enclaves without ever much mixing if they don’t want to or can’t. I mean large both in terms of population – there are about 4.5 million Sydneysiders – and spatially, with Sydney being very spread out and national parks and other sorts of greenery all round about.

As for ethnicity, there’s a sense that if you are one of those, you belong there. Muslims in Lakemba, Italians in Leichhardt, new immigrants who can’t speak English in Ashfield, and so forth. It’s a big city and there are all kinds of people from all kinds of groups all over. It says a lot about this city that there are such strong ideas, regardless, about who belongs where, and who is straying out of their space.

You know what must be nice?

Having a life like this:

But they also say it’s hard to justify dumping a can of mystery meat for Bo while the rest of the family is sitting down to grass-fed osso buco with a side of biodynamic polenta. As people eat more sustainable seasonal produce and meat raised and butchered outside the industrial system, so do their pets. And as do-it-yourself hobbies like canning, gardening and raising backyard chickens have taken off in recent years, grinding 40 pounds of pet food starts to look like another fun weekend project.

I do love simple family dinners of grass-fed osso buco and biodynamic polenta. Who doesn’t? And yes, that is an article about making your own pet food. Which, before anyone gets mad, is not something I am opposed to, if that is how you want to spend your weekend! What is annoying is that, because it’s the New York Times, making your own pet food is presented as super-bourgie and also entirely necessary if you are the kind of person who only buys grass-fed beef and avoids processed foods (and I actually try to only buy grass-fed beef and I avoid processed foods, so this isn’t a criticism of those choices, obviously). It makes you feel kind of guilty for not loving your pet enough to make him his very own food, and it makes you resent the pet-food-makers for their fanciness and sanctimony, and it sells making your own pet food as a Rich Person Thing. Which I don’t think it has to be (even though I think it’s probably a bad idea for most people, since most people do not know the intricacies of animal nutritional needs).

Don’t get me wrong, the Make Your Own Pet Food People can be plenty sanctimonious. When I adopted my cat I had to go to Cat Lady Class to learn the ins and outs of cat ownership (you have to put screens on your windows because cats will definitely fall out; cats are allergic to onions; you should probably get your cat’s balls removed; etc etc), and we were told in no uncertain terms that if we really truly loved our cats and wanted the best for them, we would make them organic food and never ever buy food from the store. But if we were selfish enough that we would not, in fact, cook for our cats, then the only reasonable option was to feed them organic wet food that we only bought after carefully reading the label to make sure that the first ingredients weren’t nasty. If we did decide to feed our cats dry food, or some godforsaken brand like Friskies or Fancy Feast or Alpo, the cat should be taken away by CPS.

I decided to go the middle route: Bourgie organic food bought at the organic deli, after carefully reading the labels. Later, for medical reasons, prescription cat food. Middle-ground sanctimony.

So, point being, I haven’t exactly jumped on the cooking-for-cats bandwagon. That is a bandwagon that I never plan to jump on, actually, and the fact that I even had to attend something called “cat class” made me seriously reconsider the choices I had made up to that point in my life. But that said, it seems like, as is true with eating healthy, cooking for your pet is presented by the Times as something that’s unattainable for most people, unless you have a ton of extra time and a lot of extra cash, and is a class thing that only bored rich people do. Now, being that I have never cooked for my pet and I am almost definitely not going to start anytime soon (sorry, cat), I have no first-hand knowledge as to whether that’s true or not. But I’m guessing it is not, and, like preparing a healthy meal, it is not totally impossible to do on a budget and even with time constraints. The framing of home-cooked pet food, though, feeds right into the Healthy Food Culture Wars, where Rich Liberal Elitists are trying to force-feed you arugula, while Good Down-Home Folks know that a heart attack on a plate is the only way to be a True American — it’s a fictional debate. And the Times, because it’s the Times, has totally created a ridiculous “trend” story that seems to be based mostly on “here is this thing that one of my friends does sometimes,” and is basically prodding its readership to seriously consider whether it’s Class War time.

Do I think making your own pet food is a little bit silly? Yeah (although not as silly as feeding your dog a vegan diet. Seriously?). And it’s also potentially really bad for your pet, if you don’t do your homework to make sure they’re getting all of the nutrients they need. But grinding up some organs and feeding them to your favorite beast doesn’t have to be an Organic Farmer / Rich Person Thing. It will probably always be a dirty hippie thing,* but we all knew that.

______________________________________
*KIDDING. Also, I just wrote 650 fairly earnest words about making your own pet food, so I don’t think any of you should take me too seriously.

Ross Douthat, mad again that women don’t want to be walking wombs

Ross Douthat apparently finds it paradoxical that some women want to have children but can’t, and some can have children but don’t want to, and the ones that don’t want to aren’t giving birth for the ones who can’t. Which leads me to believe that Ross Douthat has no idea what pregnancy or childbirth actually entails, since he doesn’t seem to understand that it involves significant physical and emotional difficulty.

Or perhaps he does, and doesn’t care. He writes:

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

It’s as if the “unborn” exist unto themselves, and we are callously and casually destroying them. Douthat neglects to recognize that there’s a woman involved, and that the desire of one woman to have a child doesn’t mean that a second woman is morally obligated to undergo nearly ten months of physically and emotionally trying pregnancy.

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

It is absolutely true that legal abortion has decreased the number of “desireable” (white, able-bodied, infant) children available for adoption. Forty years ago, the women giving birth to those babies were mostly young and unmarried; a lot of those women were shipped off to boarding houses for pregnant girls, or cloistered away so they wouldn’t shame their families. Adoption wasn’t much of a choice — the girl in question wasn’t often given the option of raising her own child. Women who did raise children without husbands were not looked upon kindly.

It’s also absolutely true that birth control has decreased the pool of potentially adoptable babies. I suppose in Douthat’s world, that’s a bad thing too, since any control over your reproduction is suspect. But for most of us, being able to prevent pregnancies we don’t want is a net gain.

Douthat also talks a big game about valuing and protecting the unborn, but neglects to lay out the specifics about how he proposes we actually do that. Implicit in his column is the argument that we outlaw abortion, but he never actually comes out and says that — probably because he realizes that when it comes right down to it, a lot of people really don’t like the idea of criminalizing women who don’t believe it’s their burden to provide babies for anyone who wants one. It’s also a lot easier to talk about “valuing life” (and to really mean “punishing women”) than it is to take the sometimes costly steps that actually value that life — providing affordable health care, early-childhood education, childcare, paid maternity leave, and on and on. You know, things that social conservatives like Douthat routinely oppose because of “personal responsibility” and “keeping the government out of our lives.”

We all know that Douthat isn’t a big fan of the ladies (or the rights of ladies). But his concern here isn’t just for fetuses — it’s also for “good” families that, in his estimation, deserve children from not-good women. The old era of adoptions, where middle and upper-middle-class families were able to adopt babies birthed in secret by teenage mothers, required not only a crackdown on women’s bodily autonomy, but also a social model that deemed single mothers inherently bad, and certain families (largely white, headed by a heterosexual couple, and on the wealthier side of not) to be the only acceptable ones. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about a return to an idealized, gender-inegalitarian, racially divided and socially stratified time. It’s about making sure women know that their place isn’t just at home and in the service of their husbands, but also in the service of “better” families.

Good luck with that.

Also, Ross Douthat? Abortions were had on those “most libertine programs” Sex & the City and Mad Men. Characters also decided to give birth. So while you’re learning about the birds and the bees and how pregnancy actually impacts a woman’s body, maybe Netflix some of those shows too.

Jayaben Desai, 1933-2010

Jayaben Desai has died at 77 years of age. From The Hindu:

The diminutive India-born Ms. Desai, who moved to Britain from Tanzania in 1969, came to be known as a “lioness” for her role in leading the two-year long strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, north London, in the 1970s to demand union recognition for its largely Asian and female workforce.

She famously told a manager: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’’

Jack Dromey has written an obituary at The Guardian.