Roe v. Wade at 40
A modest roundup.
Jill Filipovic:To anyone who has taken even a cursory look at reproductive rights activism, it's obvious that decreasing the abortion rate isn't nearly as much a concern for the pro-life movement as controlling women is. ... Despite knowing the key to a lower abortion rate, the so-called "pro-life" movement refuses to use it. Instead, they feign concern for babies while doing absolutely nothing to help children and everything in their power to make women's lives harder and more dangerous if those women dare to believe that they're entitled to a fulfilling sex life.
Or, what Emmily Bristol says: "This debate is not about fetuses. This debate is about whether or not women are people."
A Lizz Winstead post from last month that I can't recommend highly enough for its refusal to pull punches and frame abortion as something tragic... or anyone else's business.
Mehcad Brooks of True Blood and Necessary Roughness has a video message.
ABC News, with a tale from 1971:Deborah Arrindell was a freshman in college when a friend asked her to watch over an upperclassman girl, whose doctor packed her vagina with gauze and sent her home with orders to drink hot turpentine tea to stop her unwanted pregnancy. They were the only two people in the University of Oklahoma dormitory that weekend, and when Arrindell realized that the hot turpentine fumes were making the pregnant girl throw up, she mixed the toxic oil with Tang instead.
Similarly, in the New York Times, Kate Manning describes the many grisly ways women have tried to end pregnancy in the absence of legal access to safe abortion.
Before Roe, 1 in 5 maternal deaths was caused by unsafe abortion; today, less than 0.3 percent of women undergoing legal abortions sustain a serious complication. What would life today be like without Roe?
Time has a Q&A with Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who at age 26 successfully argued the case for Roe before the Supreme Court.
Scott Lemieux rebuts five myths about Roe: that it's unpopular, that no anti-choice movement existed before it, that anti-abortion pols oppose it based on "state's rights," that overturning it would be no big deal to abortion rights, and that Roe doesn't/shouldn't matter to poor women.
Relative to that first myth, Raw Story reports that70 percent of Americans say that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, with 57 percent of Americans feeling strongly about it. The poll also showed that 31 percent of Americans felt that abortion should be “always legal” and 23 percent felt it should be legal “most of the time.” Just 9 percent of Americans said they felt that abortion should be always illegal.
There is also a DailyKos diary up about that poll, as well as two other pro-choice diaries for today: 40 Years of Legalized Abortion: The Fabric of America, and Exposing the "pro-life" movement with three letters: IVF.
ETA: The Originalist Argument for Abortion Rights: Compulsory Childbearing During Antebellum Slavery.
Also, ontd-political has a timeline of reproductive rights in the United States
Relevant to Lemieux's second myth: NPR has a post about the pre-Roe history of the fetus-hugger movement. Note that, because even in the 1960s U.S. Catholics "believed that the abortion decision should be between a woman and her doctor," the church had to set up a bunch of a "grassroots" groups to make opposition to abortion appear more widespread among Catholics.
Forty years on, the GOP is more conservative on abortion than ever...
and has had great success at chipping away at abortion rights.
Anti-choice legislation is also hurting pregnant women who don't necessarily want abortions. As Soraya Chemaly reports, the American Journal of Public Health recently published an article titled "Roe v Wade and the New Jane Crow: Reproductive Rights in the Age of Mass Incarceration." (Big surprise: Poor women and/or women of color suffer most.)
One of the study's co-authors says, "We use this language very carefully and very deliberately. This problem falls at the intersection of reproductive justice, the war on drugs and our system of mass incarceration. It is far more likely today than in 1973 that women will be incarcerated if Roe is overturned."
Abortion is not only painted as something only rich women care about, but something only white women care about. Shanelle Matthews, Dani McClain, and Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell talk about the absence of black women's voices in the debate.
Affording abortion in the U.S. is extraordinarily difficult for many women. Laura W. Murphy calls on Obama to remove budgetary restrictions on abortion. Here's a petition calling for same, and another petition urging state policymakers to end attacks on access to reproductive healthcare.
Meanwhile, if you can, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is today celebrating its 20th anniversity, or state-level charities like the New York Abortion Access Fund which "supports anyone who is unable to pay fully for an abortion and is living in or travelling to New York State by providing financial assistance and connections to other resources."
This is depressing: Of Americans under age 30, 57% don't know Roe is about abortion. Worse, 68% of Republicans under 30 know the content of the decision, versus only 57% of their Democratic counterparts.
In response, the Abortion Gang recalls when each of them first learned about Roe. And the Guttmacher Institute asks, "Are you in the know when it comes to the facts on US abortion?"
Young Turks interviews Dr. Willie Parker, a Chicago-based ob/gyn who routinely travels to Mississippi to provide abortions and other healthcare for women. Parker says:I was fully aware that there were extreme views on this issue and that some people feel empowered to act out those extreme views. When I say I was concerned, it was merely my awareness of the risk of physical harm. … I became uncomfortable having to turn women away when in every other aspect of their reproductive health care I was prepared to provide services for them.
Rachel Maddow and her producer Rebecca Dryden discuss a project underway to provide abortion and other women's health services at the former clinic of Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by an anti-choicer. His former colleague Julie Burkhart is a brave woman.
Finally, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona writes that this is the perfect time to start regaining all the lost ground on repro rights in the U.S. And Planned Parenthood at the national level wants anti-choicers to know that Roe is Here for Good.
There is much more, too much to keep up with, at #Roe40 and #Roeat40 (with, unfortunately, some drivel from fetus-freaks in there too). Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1954175.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.
Jill Filipovic:To anyone who has taken even a cursory look at reproductive rights activism, it's obvious that decreasing the abortion rate isn't nearly as much a concern for the pro-life movement as controlling women is. ... Despite knowing the key to a lower abortion rate, the so-called "pro-life" movement refuses to use it. Instead, they feign concern for babies while doing absolutely nothing to help children and everything in their power to make women's lives harder and more dangerous if those women dare to believe that they're entitled to a fulfilling sex life.
Or, what Emmily Bristol says: "This debate is not about fetuses. This debate is about whether or not women are people."
A Lizz Winstead post from last month that I can't recommend highly enough for its refusal to pull punches and frame abortion as something tragic... or anyone else's business.
Mehcad Brooks of True Blood and Necessary Roughness has a video message.
ABC News, with a tale from 1971:Deborah Arrindell was a freshman in college when a friend asked her to watch over an upperclassman girl, whose doctor packed her vagina with gauze and sent her home with orders to drink hot turpentine tea to stop her unwanted pregnancy. They were the only two people in the University of Oklahoma dormitory that weekend, and when Arrindell realized that the hot turpentine fumes were making the pregnant girl throw up, she mixed the toxic oil with Tang instead.
Similarly, in the New York Times, Kate Manning describes the many grisly ways women have tried to end pregnancy in the absence of legal access to safe abortion.
Before Roe, 1 in 5 maternal deaths was caused by unsafe abortion; today, less than 0.3 percent of women undergoing legal abortions sustain a serious complication. What would life today be like without Roe?
Time has a Q&A with Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who at age 26 successfully argued the case for Roe before the Supreme Court.
Scott Lemieux rebuts five myths about Roe: that it's unpopular, that no anti-choice movement existed before it, that anti-abortion pols oppose it based on "state's rights," that overturning it would be no big deal to abortion rights, and that Roe doesn't/shouldn't matter to poor women.
Relative to that first myth, Raw Story reports that70 percent of Americans say that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, with 57 percent of Americans feeling strongly about it. The poll also showed that 31 percent of Americans felt that abortion should be “always legal” and 23 percent felt it should be legal “most of the time.” Just 9 percent of Americans said they felt that abortion should be always illegal.
There is also a DailyKos diary up about that poll, as well as two other pro-choice diaries for today: 40 Years of Legalized Abortion: The Fabric of America, and Exposing the "pro-life" movement with three letters: IVF.
ETA: The Originalist Argument for Abortion Rights: Compulsory Childbearing During Antebellum Slavery.
Also, ontd-political has a timeline of reproductive rights in the United States
Relevant to Lemieux's second myth: NPR has a post about the pre-Roe history of the fetus-hugger movement. Note that, because even in the 1960s U.S. Catholics "believed that the abortion decision should be between a woman and her doctor," the church had to set up a bunch of a "grassroots" groups to make opposition to abortion appear more widespread among Catholics.
Forty years on, the GOP is more conservative on abortion than ever...
and has had great success at chipping away at abortion rights.
Anti-choice legislation is also hurting pregnant women who don't necessarily want abortions. As Soraya Chemaly reports, the American Journal of Public Health recently published an article titled "Roe v Wade and the New Jane Crow: Reproductive Rights in the Age of Mass Incarceration." (Big surprise: Poor women and/or women of color suffer most.)
One of the study's co-authors says, "We use this language very carefully and very deliberately. This problem falls at the intersection of reproductive justice, the war on drugs and our system of mass incarceration. It is far more likely today than in 1973 that women will be incarcerated if Roe is overturned."
Abortion is not only painted as something only rich women care about, but something only white women care about. Shanelle Matthews, Dani McClain, and Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell talk about the absence of black women's voices in the debate.
Affording abortion in the U.S. is extraordinarily difficult for many women. Laura W. Murphy calls on Obama to remove budgetary restrictions on abortion. Here's a petition calling for same, and another petition urging state policymakers to end attacks on access to reproductive healthcare.
Meanwhile, if you can, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is today celebrating its 20th anniversity, or state-level charities like the New York Abortion Access Fund which "supports anyone who is unable to pay fully for an abortion and is living in or travelling to New York State by providing financial assistance and connections to other resources."
This is depressing: Of Americans under age 30, 57% don't know Roe is about abortion. Worse, 68% of Republicans under 30 know the content of the decision, versus only 57% of their Democratic counterparts.
In response, the Abortion Gang recalls when each of them first learned about Roe. And the Guttmacher Institute asks, "Are you in the know when it comes to the facts on US abortion?"
Young Turks interviews Dr. Willie Parker, a Chicago-based ob/gyn who routinely travels to Mississippi to provide abortions and other healthcare for women. Parker says:I was fully aware that there were extreme views on this issue and that some people feel empowered to act out those extreme views. When I say I was concerned, it was merely my awareness of the risk of physical harm. … I became uncomfortable having to turn women away when in every other aspect of their reproductive health care I was prepared to provide services for them.
Rachel Maddow and her producer Rebecca Dryden discuss a project underway to provide abortion and other women's health services at the former clinic of Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by an anti-choicer. His former colleague Julie Burkhart is a brave woman.
Finally, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona writes that this is the perfect time to start regaining all the lost ground on repro rights in the U.S. And Planned Parenthood at the national level wants anti-choicers to know that Roe is Here for Good.
There is much more, too much to keep up with, at #Roe40 and #Roeat40 (with, unfortunately, some drivel from fetus-freaks in there too). Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1954175.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.