For Girls Who

[rewiredotnews]

Murphy's Law (of Hypocrisy): It's OK to Be Anti-Abortion Until You Need One - Rewire

Because abortion opponents like Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, who was outed for asking a mistress to end a pregnancy, have "good" abortions.

Call it Tim Murphy’s Law — “the only good abortion is my abortion.” Just as it is not uncommon for abortion clinics to end up treating protesters as patients when the need arises, anti-choice politicians and their families need abortions, too.

They just don’t want to extend that choice to everyone else. A quick search of the “prolife” hashtag on Twitter reveals the movement’s enduring thoughts about people who have abortions. They are “murderers” and “killers” who do not care about babies (despite the fact that Congress let the Children’s Health Insurance Program expire, making health care disappear for 9 million low-income children, and continues to push for less restrictive gun laws despite an increase in mass shootings).

But scratch the surface, and it’s apparent that those labels are for the people they’ve othered: the reckless, selfish, or lazy women who just need to “accept responsibility.” Those labels are not for governors or elected representatives who suddenly find themselves considering abortion. Those labels are not for Christians who have had abortions.

Those labels are not for the “good” abortions.

[forgirlswho]

For “Fearless Girl” on International Women’s Day

I spent most of yesterday with a vague sense of annoyance. It was a confusing feeling. Having worked at an all-girls school for three years, International Women’s Day was always a cause for celebration, a reminder to our young female students that YOU are valued and needed and can and will do amazing things. 

But yesterday, it just...didn’t feel true. Do I think young women can do anything they set their minds to? Of course. But something about the pageantry of yesterday (the unending emails landing in my inbox hawking everything from Loft clothing to paper towels with vague ties to girl-power; the countless op-eds and twitter rants about the strike-who it was for? what will it accomplish? is it privileged?; the hordes of men coming out of the woodwork to either pay lip service to the day or use it as another platform to shout reverse-sexism...) left me more angry, frustrated, and tired than inspired. 

So many people have been fighting these battles for so freaking long, I thought, and THIS is where we are? The whole world is watching what we will do with a sexist president who is hell-bent on stripping and outright denying women basic human rights and we STILL can’t get people with their heads-in-the-sand about systemic sexism to wake up and see? 

And the thing I kept going back to over and over yesterday: “Fearless Girl.”

“Fearless Girl” pissed me off for a lot of reasons. 

After learning it was a PR stunt about hiring more women from from a rich Wall Street company (of course, headed by a man--JUST DO IT! Stop talking about it, commissioning art about it, giving all-male panels about it) I was annoyed at its glaring ignorance about intersectionality and how large a role our strict adherence to American capitalism plays in keeping women out of these roles in the first place. (You want more women in the Board Room? Create some freaking family-friendly policies. You want more women in the world of high finance? Let’s get some mandated parental leave, actual pumping rooms for people who breastfeed, flexible schedules, and HR-trainings about the “Mommy Penalty” vs. “Daddy Bonus.”) Policies like collective bargaining rights, paid time off, and affordable health care options are policies that would not only get more women the rights they need to break that glass ceiling, they are also just basic human rights all workers should have that would benefit society as a whole. Make a statue of workers meeting to start a union. Or a statue of a contractual provision guaranteeing maternity/paternity leave. Or even a statue of an ACTUAL WOMAN who wants that job in the board room you’re so insisting she should have. 

Beyond that, mainstream feminism needs to chill out with this obsession with “defiant” girls. We’re living in a time period of one of the biggest platforms, largest bases, and brightest spotlights feminism has ever had and we’re insistent on pinning everything on “feisty” “rebellious” “plucky” “precocious” little girls. 

Our entertainment is full of them. “Logan”’s got one (who is frustratingly silent during most of the film.) And I love Eleven from “Stranger Things” as much as the next person but as a grown woman I would’ve loved to see Joyce’s adult/mother character showcase some of that applause-inducing defiance. 

Because it’s not just in the fictional worlds of film and television where we’re putting this weight on little girls. After Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech, the line directed at little girls watching, that they should “never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world” blew up, retweeted thousands of times, made into poster prints for mothers to hang in their daughter’s bedrooms, and generated memes for days. People said over and over that some little girl watching would be president.   

And again, it’s not that little girls should not believe this. It’s not that little girls should not be told every, single day that they can achieve and be whatever they want in the world. But the burden should not be theirs alone. We, women and men, have so much freaking work to do.

We can “ban bossy” in schools. We can replace princess with scientists. We can mandate GirlsWhoCode in every high school across the nation. We SHOULD keep inspiring, uplifting, and encouraging every single little girl. 

But let’s not forget to lay the blame of why all these things are so necessary squarely at the feet of a sexist society set up to cater to, benefit, and advance men. Let’s not blame the girl who likes pink or wants to be a teacher instead a rocket scientist. Let’s not blame the girl who prefers quiet, alone time. Let’s not swing our pendulum so far that we have a generation of little girls growing up thinking the only way they have value, the only way they can be seen, is standing, unafraid, in the face of certain danger. Let’s stop, for feminism’s sake, insisting there is only one way to be a strong girl.

Let’s not make our girls fight our battles for us. Let’s have a society of men and women fight now so they don’t have to later. 

[forgirlswho]

[forgirlswho]

Tea Brewed With Parsley

Tea brewed with parsley was what I drank when I was living in Dublin, Ireland and didn't know why my period was two months late. Tea brewed with parsley because the Internet said it would make my period come. The internet because pro-life fliers hung on the back of every bathroom stall door and the student health center definitely didn't stock emergency contraception. Tea brewed with parsley which was just me dumping parsley seasoning into a cup and pouring boiling water over it. Waiting for it to cool. Drinking the whole thing, parsley and all, because there were no further instructions. Tea brewed with parsley. Because there was no Planned Parenthood, where I'd sought safe advice so many times before. I stand with planned Parenthood because I shutter to remember the alternatives.

[forgirlswho]

Men Love Defending Senator Warren. But What About The Rest Of Us? - Role Reboot

The men on my feeds are shocked and appalled by what happened to Warren. I’m shocked and appalled because I’ve seen the men on my feeds do the exact same thing. As you’ve most likely seen, Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced in the Senate on Tuesday while attempting to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King while …

Defending Senator Warren in the face of her silencing? Don’t forget about the rest of the women in your life...and your own behavior.

[forgirlswho]

"This is not our first March for Life but it is the warmest." *whispers* It's...it's...global warming.

[forgirlswho]

"If men got pregnant, you could get an abortion at an ATM" - Selina Meyer, the only Veep I'm listening to today about abortion and this bogus, paternalistic, unsupported by science or public opinion March for Life.

[reprorights]

Trump wants Roe v. Wade overturned. What if that actually happened? Use this new interactive map to find out whether your state would be at risk of losing the right to abortion.

[forgirlswho]

But despite my best intentions and pseudo-Buddhist upbringing, I don't feel bad for them. I don't feel compassion. I just hate them. That's all I have.

Jessica Valenti, "Sex Object"

[forgirlswho]

oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles, and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them but I won’t, because they’re my family,

Revenge, Elisa Chavez (The Seattle Review of Books)

[forgirlswho]

Doing a media blackout of Inauguration? Buy a book to read instead! All proceeds go to the National Network of Abortion Funds.

[forgirlswho]

These Pro-Lifers Are Headed to the Women's March on Washington

Is there room in the movement for people who morally object to abortion?

It’s not a question of “Is there room in the movement?” It’s the understanding that the group’s anti-choice stance is not only diametrically opposed to the platform principals released by the organizers of the march but also dramatically undermines the values, beliefs, and lives of those planning on attending. 

Women are being arrested because they cannot access safe abortions. Women are dying because they cannot access safe abortions. If you are on the side of restricting access to abortion, you are saying you are okay with both these things happening with greater and greater frequency. Because, as we all know, abortion doesn’t go away because it’s illegal.     

Not only that, but if you are on the side of restricting abortion access you are telling everyone who could ever need an abortion that the inequalities they face don’t matter. Because all the inequalities faced are inextricably linked to the abortion debate, which at its heart, is a dispute over control of ones own body. It affects people economically, careers, housing, and financial stability inevitably tied to when and how one decides to have children. It affects people societally, the proverbial ability to “have it all” seemingly dependent on the act of childbearing. It affects people legally, Constitutional rights under constant attack. 

Make no mistake, the loss of access to safe abortion not only means the loss of the ability to control one’s own body but also to make the choices so fundamental to all aspects of a person’s life. To not believe in abortion is to not believe in so many other long fought-for rights and actively remove yourself from so many fights to come.

So I guess to answer the question, no there is not room in the movement. 

[rewiredotnews]

[PHOTO: Six-week gestational sac]

When legislators propose 6-week abortion bans, this is what they’re banning.

Last year, the Ohio legislature passed a 6-week abortion ban that John Kasich later vetoed (and then immediately signed into law an equally unconstitutional 20-week abortion ban.) 

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has now introduced a bill modeled on Ohio’s bill that amounts to a federal ban on all abortions. 

Read: Total Abortion Ban Debuts in Congress, by Christine Grimaldi at Rewire [January 13, 2017)

Track this bill and others in the Rewire Legislative Tracker, an easily searchable database of the laws, people, organizations, and litigation involved in sexual and reproductive health and justice in the United States, as well as the connections among them. 

[forgirlswho]

Today's round of The Handmaid's Tale or actual abortion ban politicians are trying to pass? 😕

[forgirlswho]

Ireland Reconsiders Its Constitutional Ban on Abortion

A 100-member citizens assembly convened by Parliament has been asked to re-examine an amendment approved in a 1983 referendum.

It wasn’t until I thought I was facing an unexpected pregnancy while studying in Dublin that I fully considered my pro-choice beliefs. I had grown up, thankfully, in a state where abortion was legal and accessible. It wasn’t until I was stranded in a country where pro-life fliers hung on the back of nearly every bathroom stall at school that reality hit that this was a world many women faced as politicians across America actively campaigned to strip women of their right to choose. 

Thankfully, it turned out I wasn’t pregnant, but that feeling of being trapped stayed with me. America is heading down a dangerous, horrifying path as bans, waiting periods, TRAP regulations, and other misguided restrictions preventing women from accessing safe abortions are continuously proposed and passed. 

Abortion will not go away simply because it is illegal.

“Abortions happen, everyday. Making them illegal doesn’t stop woman needing, or wanting them, or inflicting them on themselves — there will always be coat hangers, broken bottles, painkillers, stairs to fall down, fists to hit, medicines to swallow.”

[forgirlswho]

About seven-in-ten Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade

More than 40 years after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, 69% of Americans say the historic ruling should not be completely overturned.

Though a solid majority oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, it hasn’t stopped the GOP from a scary, fierce, and destructive push to go against collective interest.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said that Republicans will move to strip all federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

I wrote this in September 2015, when all this nonsense was just starting (who could’ve guessed how much time and money would be wasted!) And I think it’s still true, and even more important to remember today:

Planned Parenthood offers contraceptives and birth control options. Planned Parenthood offers STD testing/treatments and cancer screenings. Planned Parenthood offers pregnancy testing and prenatal services.

Even if Planned Parenthood offered NONE of these services, even if they offered nothing but access to safe and legal abortions, we must support it. We live in a terrifying time where representatives will do anything (including outright lie) to strip away our right to choose. We can't be afraid to say we stand with Planned Parenthood, not despite the fact that they offer abortion services, but because of it. I Still Stand With Planned Parenthood.

[forgirlswho]

The study found that  "...women receiving first-trimester abortions were no more or less affected than those ending pregnancies later."

This is so important to remember in the face of the increased proposals and supports for 20-week bans. 

Beyond debunking the common argument that people experience “abortion regret” the study also disproves the assumption that it is more emotionally difficult for a person choosing to end a pregnancy later.

Abortions after 20-weeks are incredibly rare. Often they involve severe fetal anomalies and serious risks to the woman’s health which can, of course, be devastating. 

But “the study included hundreds of women who sought [abortions] later in pregnancy. There were 452 whose pregnancies were within two weeks of the clinic’s limit and who received abortions and 231 women who were denied abortions because their pregnancies were up to three weeks past the clinic’s limit. The study also included 273 women who received first-trimester abortions.”

Policy should never be based on assumption of feelings and guesswork around “expected” responses.