Posts Tagged ‘Reproductive Rights’
Aniston-O’Reilly Tiff Mirrors Gender Disparities on Women’s Equality Day 2010
Posted today on Truthout:
Jennifer Aniston sparked a classic Bill O’Reilly firestorm when she said a woman doesn’t need a man to have children and a perfectly fine life, thank you very much.
Defending not her personal situation but the character she plays in “The Switch,” her hit movie about a single woman who chose to be impregnated by a sperm donor, Aniston opined, “Women are realizing…they don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”
O’Reilly retorted that Aniston trivialized the role of men, saying she was “throwing out a message to twelve and thirteen-year-olds that ‘Hey, you don’t need a dad,’ and that’s destructive.”
Read MoreThe Feministing Five Interview
Feministing.com’s Chloe Angyal asked me the five questions that the terrific online community puts to a different feminist every week. In case you have ever wondered what food, beverage, and feminist I’d take with me to a desert island, read on…
Gloria Feldt is a force to be reckoned with. Feldt is the former President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America and has devoted her entire working life to women’s rights. This week marked the conclusion of efforts to pass health care reform, and because abortion coverage was used, successfully, as a wedge issue in the debate over those efforts, it’s important to reflect on what went wrong, what we did right, and what our next steps should be. And who better to help us understand that than Feldt?
Read MoreReclaiming the Means of Reproduction
Lilith Magazine asked me to review Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction. The book waspublished earlier this year and at first I thought this review would be a bit dated. As it turns out, given the health reform debate in which women’s reproductive health is once again the battering ram for Republicans who want to kill reform and controversial fodder for the pundits, the subject matter couldn’t be more timely. In particular, Goldberg’s discussion of the damage done globally to women’s health by the Helms amendment shouts the warning about what might well happen in the U.S. if the Stupak-Pitts amendment prevails.
Michelle Goldberg’s captivating book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin Press, 2009) is perfectly timed to remind those who came of age post-Roe v Wade and might think they can relax under an Obama administration, just how much work is left to do. An investigative journalist and author previously of Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism, Goldberg has imbued this long-running story with fresh power by telling it in her young feminist voice.
The Means of Reproduction is a sweeping history of U.S. foreign policy on international family planning that spans four continents and the covers issues such as birth control, abortion, HIV/AIDS, their intersections with environmental concerns and economic development, and the gender politics of all, while staying in intimate touch with how America’s policies affect real women globally.
The story begins during the 1960’s cold war when Republicans like John D. Rockefeller and, yes, George H.W. “Rubbers” Bush led the charge to secure U.S. funding for international family planning, convinced that population pressures threatened national security. Then as now, family planning proponents met predictable adversaries. Goldberg writes, “There is one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world, a critique that joins Protestant fundamentalism, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics. All view women’s equality and self-possession as unnatural, a violation of the established order. Yet in one society after another, we can see the absence of women’s rights creating existential dangers.”
Read MoreSotomayor! Sotomayor? Sotomayor.
Yesterday, Alan Colmes’ new show, strategyroom.com, caught up with me as I was running from meeting to meeting in the rain, and asked me to talk with them about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination especially related to her reproductive rights decisions. Here’s the video segment, where you’ll see the right-wing guest Wendy Long, acknowledging that the Republicans probably wouldn’t support any Obama nominee. Alan had some great examples of how the issues of empathy and personal life experiences have been used in the past to argue for SCOTUS nominees that might surprise you. Take a look:
Where Common Ground Gets Shaky
First, please read for yourself Rachel Laser’s “Conceiving Common Ground” over at the website RHRealityCheck (btw, if you don’t already have RHRC on your bookmarked blog list, do it now; they provide exellent information and provocative articles like this one every day. Dozens of times through the 30 years I worked for Planned Parenthood and in the several years since, there have been efforts to find the so-called “third way” or “common ground.” I’ve had the privilege to be involved in some profound conversations with people who come from a wide range of pro- and anti-choice perspectives. I learned a great deal from them and they helped me shape or sometimes deepen my own convictions by questioning them.
Somehow, though, these efforts fail on three points, and the quest for the third way becomes a fool’s errand.
Read MoreSetting the World Aright for Reproductive Rights
My new post in On the Issues is up today. They call it “A Do Over for Reproductive Rights”. I had named it “Turning the World Upside Down to See Reproductive Justice”. I liked their alliteration, so I came up with “Turning the World Aright for for Reproductive Rights.” Anyway, I don’t believe in do overs. Here’s the commentary:
Lars Larson is a conservative radio talk show host with a following of four million listeners. His producer assured me, when asking me to appear for Roe v Wade’s 36th anniversary, that Lars is respectful, though he would take views opposite to mine. No problem, I said, as long as I can speak my piece.
My “piece” led me to talk about where I think the debate should be: squarely on women’s human rights to make their own childbearing decisions, access to preventive family planning services, and economic justice, as well as abortion. It flipped Lars out. When he couldn’t keep the conversation on pitting the innocent baby against the murderous woman who stupidly didn’t use birth control, he started spinning. He lectured me during the commercial break—in stern-father tones—that I was speaking my piece a little too much for his comfort. Perhaps I wasn’t being the desired foil.
.
Though he began by challenging me with the focus on the fetus, within seconds he shifted to peppering me with denigrating statements about women. What clearer example could there be of the sexism that puts all responsibility and blame for unintended pregnancy on women?
Turnabout After Prop 8 Offers Delicious Irony
While I’m riveted like rest of the nation and indeed the world, watching the events leading up to Barack Obama’s inauguration tomorrow, a news item buried deep in the national news section of the New York Times today nearly caused me to fall, laughing wildly, off the treadmill where I was reading it.
Yes, multitasking three things at once always makes me feel like I am using my time wisely. But I digress.
The article, “Marriage Ban Donors Feel Exposed by list”, reports a lawsuit filed by supporters of California’s Proposition 8, passed last November, that made same sex marriage illegal by overturning the State Supreme Court’s May, 2008, ruling that same sex marriages are legal under the California constitution.
Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind the proposition, alleges that gay rights groups are checking out the names and addresses of donors to the Prop 8 campaign. “And giving these people a map to your home or office leaves supporters of Proposition 8 feeling especially vulnerable. Really, it is chilling,” Schubert said. So they’ve filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court seeking to prevent release of the names of donors who contributed late in the campaign and have not yet been revealed in campaign filings.
Well my, my. I do empathize even if I don’t sympathize, given that the same groups that supported Prop 8 also oppose reproductive rights for women. For the 30 years I was with Planned Parenthood, they dogged me personally, stalking, picketing me at home, and often sending threatening notes. Their harrassment of doctors who provide abortion services escalated over the years to violence; as a result 87% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider.
Chilling indeed.
Read MoreAsk Obama to End the Global Gag Rule
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FK2pzLAdgQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] A brief history: The U.S. government has been playing ping pong with women’s lives globally for almost three decades, ever since Ronald Reagan first declared the “Mexico City Policy” by executive order (without a Congressional vote). Bill Clinton reversed the policy, by then known as the Global Gag Rule, the day he was inaugurated…
Read MoreBeyond Roe: Toward Human Rights for Women
With a new Obama administration about to begin, timing couldn’t be more perfect for a fresh look at reproductive rights, health, and justice policies. I reviewed the book Our Bodies, Our Crimes, by Fordham sociology Professor Jeanne Flavin, for Democracy: a Journal of Ideas. DJ asked me to write the review as an essay about…
Read MoreSarah Palin’s New Clothes
Hopefully this will be the first, last, and only time I write about Clothinggate. But strangely, this latest episode in the continuing “As Alaska Turns” soap opera has made me feel a surprising twinge of maternal instinct for Sarah Palin. She’s so miserably out of her league that her pathetic rant against McCain-Palin campaign operatives…
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