Gloria Steinem to Speak on 21st Century Feminism
In my family where there are three Glorias. I am known as Gloria #1. But in the world of feminism and activism for women, we all know who Gloria # 1 is. Alex and I are pleased as punch to invite you to our annual Women of the World lecture at Arizona State University. Gloria Steinem will honor us as our very special guest lecturer on October 17 at 7pm in the Memorial Union. It’ll be a happening, honey!
Read MoreAppeasement is Lethal
Rosaura “Rosie” Jiménez died bleeding and doubled over in excruciating pain from infection caused by the botched illegal abortion she sought in desperation. She was 27, a scholarship student in McAllen, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, six months shy of getting her teaching credential and struggling to make a better life for herself and her 5-year-old daughter when she was caught in a vise called the Hyde Amendment. This law denied her, as it has denied millions of low income women who depend on Medicaid for their health care, financial access to a safe abortion.
Rosie’s life was sacrificed on the altar of politically expedient appeasement.
Read MoreU.S.-Mexico Border Crossings Go Both ways
Mention the U.S.-Mexico border and you set off political hot buttons. Everyone knows the two countries share complex historical, economic, and cultural relationships. But one relationship is seldom acknowledged: the movement of women across the border in both directions to obtain abortions over the years.
Sarah was a 22-year-old law school student at the University of Texas when she became pregnant in 1964. Her future husband was planning to attend law school after she graduated and got a job. They agreed they didn’t want to have a child before marriage and felt they both deserved the chance to finish school. Together, they went to Piedras Negras across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, where she had an illegal, but thankfully safe, abortion.
Read MoreHappy Birthday, Margaret
Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers – and before it can be his, it is hers alone.
September 14 is the birthday of Margaret Sanger, founder of the U.S. birth control movement. She was born Margaret Higgins in Corning NY in 1879, though ever vain, she would later alter the family Bible to appear three years younger. The sixth child of eleven living siblings, her earliest childhood memories were of crying beside her mother’s bed as after she almost died following a difficult childbirth.
Sanger’s mother, Anne Higgins, did die, worn out from those too frequent pregnancies and births, at age 50. These experiences formed the sensibilities that propelled Margaret Sanger to advocate for birth control. She dedicated her first book on the fundamental rights of women to control their fertility to her mother. The quotation above and those that follow reveal her clear worldview about women and a laser beam focus on the work she believed with all her heart to be the most essential to women’s health, well-being, and rightful place in the world.
Read MoreThe First Ever SWIA Award
I am mentioned 10 times—more than even Jane Fonda or Betty Friedan–by the anti-feminist Kate O’Beirne in her book Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, which was endorsed–surprise–by Peggy Noonan, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham, This must mean I am doing something right. With those credentials as well as being an afficionada of Keith Olberman’s nightly “Worst Person in the World” shtick, I have decided to start my own award for the stupidest women in America (SWIAA ™).
O’Beirne, has the hubris necessary to claim the right to worldwide judgment. Humble person that I am, I’m planning to highlight only the stupidest women in America. And because as everyone knows I am inherently biased toward liberals, I’ll let Olberman slide this time.
My first SWIAA™ award goes hands down to Harriet Miers. Miers, the former White House Counsel who was George W. Bush’s obviously underqualified and clearly doomed token female nominee for U. S. Supreme Court who was quickly withdrawn so he could pick the white male Justice he really wanted. She continues to stand by her man with her mouth clamped shut while Congress slaps her around.
Read MoreTurn Down the Heat on Clinic Protests
t’s the sweltering heat of summer. We can count on seeing ads for escapes to the beach, reminders to wear sunscreen, and the extreme anti-reproductive rights, homophobic Operation Save America’s annual attempt to turn up the political heat by mounting a media-circus demonstration at a high profile women’s health center that provides abortions. This summer, July 14-22, the target-of-choice is the New Woman, Every Woman Healthcare Clinic in Birmingham, AL.
If the location and clinic name ring a bell, there’s good reason. In 1998, Eric Robert Rudolf detonated a firebomb of dynamite and nails at the clinic’s front door, killing police officer Robert “Sandy” Sanderson on his beat and seriously wounding clinic nurse Emily Lyons. In addition to sustaining first, second, and third degree burns covering the front of her body, Lyons lost her left eye and her right was seriously damaged. A hole the size of a fist was blown in her abdomen and her left leg was shattered—just for starters.
There’s something else we can count on too during these heated summer encounters. The doctors and women’s health groups subject to these demonstrations, along with their allies in pro-choice organizations such as NOW and the Feminist Majority that flock to defend women from OSA’s intimidating harassment, will be joined together with their adversaries in the Kabuki theater of irreconcilable opposites locked into predictable but intractable battles.
Read MoreOn abortion and breast cancer, New York Times gets headline right, story wrong
How do I even begin to comment on all the fallacies, misuse of language, and out-and-out false dichotomizing of “Breast Cancer Not Linked to Abortion, Study Says” (4/24/07) by Nicholas Bakalar in the New York Times? Though the headline is accurate, the article itself offers false balance at its worst, both creating controversy where there is none and weighing ideology against scientific facts as though they were equal.
Perhaps I’ll just start with the one and only pull quote from the piece: “New findings and a new abortion ruling may sharpen a debate.” Excuse me, but isn’t the reportage in question yet another in a long and distinguished line of peer reviewed scientific studies — published by such credible sources as the New England Journal of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute — that collectively followed millions of women over a generation and consistently found no causal link between abortion, induced or not, and breast cancer? Shouldn’t the new information diminish the debate since there seems to be little or nothing to debate about?
Read MorePartial Truth Decision
“[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations goldmine…The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it.”
So said Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.
Today’s U.S. Supreme Court’s Gonzales v Carhart decision upholding the federal abortion ban is based that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.
Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the Court’s majority, in addition to using the term “partial birth abortion”, also used the term “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors”, or if ob/gyns call them “ob/gyns”? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to “tonsillectomy doctor” or “hysterectomy doctor”? Of course not. But those who want to take away a woman’s human right to make her own childbearing decisions entirely have for so long used the term “abortion doctor” as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to use their language.
Read MoreThank You, Imus, for a Teachable Moment
This is a Moment with a capital “M”. The opportunity for fundamental social change doesn’t come often, so let’s take full advantage of it.
Shock jock Don Imus’s racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team didn’t go beyond his typical bottom feeder discourse, but in this age of YouTube and internet rapid response capability, his sleazy pot shots against a target so clearly undeserving of epithets have captured the nation’s attention. We’ve been riveted to the story and it has brought us together. Interest soon turned to outrage; the outrage continues to mushroom into new social expectations. Suddenly it is Imus who’s shocked. Even Oprah is talking about it, and when a story reaches that level, you know Imus had better head for rehab fast because the times, they are a-changing.
Read MoreThe Great Scrotum Flap
Did you read the New York Times front-page article by Julie Bosman on school librarians’ censorship of a Newberry Award-winning children’s book “The Higher Power of Lucky”?
It’s creating quite a flap as well it should. I wrote the following letter to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz in response to her excellent column “One Word Ignites Some Librarians’ Ire.”
Read MoreRe: Your great column on the great scrotum flap
Dear Connie,
Yesterday morning when I read the piece about “The Higher Power of Lucky” in the NY Times, I immediately sat down to write an op ed myself. But I could not come close to the one you wrote and I want to thank you for it. In particular, your sharing of the personal story is always the most compelling truth.