Burn it Down
START HERE:
Why have a white man from England tell us about the latest Abortion SCOTUS debacles? Because John Oliver does not mince words...and because maybe if a white guy in a suit on cable news says it, we have a fighting chance. Just don't get your hopes up people...this battle is going to get rough.
JUNE 6th
This is Allyship:
The man remained secured to the fence for about 15 minutes until he was removed by authorities. He held up a green bandana with the address of an abortion rights group's website. In a video on the group's Twitter feed, the man identified himself as Guido Reichstadter of Miami and said he was there because Americans' rights were coming under attack.
"I'm doing this as the first step, kind of like throwing down the gauntlet, the first step in a call to the people of America who support abortion rights - and that's the vast majority of us - to step out of inaction and passivity and sitting back and to enter nonviolent resistance," he said.
How bad could it get?
I am not sure you want to ask that question. You may stumble across things like this...
The Feticide Playbook from the NYT is truly terrifying.
Corporate America is mostly silent on the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade
We shouldn't necessarily want more company involvement other than financial support for the freedom to choose.
How Ridiculous is this really?
From Mashable: "Feeling lost? Follow these reproductive justice accounts.
Promoting access to personal health education and advocacy, one page at a time. By Chase DiBenedetto on May 6, 2022
Stories of Activism
Read this: Blog post about the Freedom Summer and activists who went hardcore.
"On what happens when it feels like all hope is lost and the real work begins"
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Rage Against the Manchin
This is not about Joe. It's not about Biden, Manchin, or my ex from my early 20s. This is about Joe Shmo, the average bro, who has more say over our future than the billions of people who will be suffering in it.
In Manchin's case, I ask daily, how does one man has this much power? He's not even particularly charming, good looking, or smart. Is he especially good at his job? It seems like he's doing everything but his job. Literally his job is to govern and pass laws and protect constituents and the constitution.
Elected Democrats, especially after the orange toilet attempted a coup and election fraud, should want to keep their jobs.
80% of Democrats want the right to choose.
Manchin's lack of support for Biden and the democratic majority is like telling not only his supporters, but over 250 million Americans to go fuck off. Deal with the consequences of sex on your own. We're taking away all access to reproductive care. You have no universal healthcare. Good luck. I don't really care, do you?
And yet, even Manchin isn't the problem. The problem is we have people who are originalists in power, lauding a democratic government that is anything but, as they gut all rights to choose our leadership, or have any say in elections.
They tried to steal an election through gaslighting: saying we were stealing the election. But they are taking so much more: they are taking our voice. How a government spends money or what our representatives legislate on our behalf is everything. If they don't do the will of their constituents, we have no voice.
Per Gloria Steinem, "If we can't vote, we don't exist."
We're invisible but still expected to pay taxes! Why? No taxation without representation.
How is this any different from those who declared independence from England to have a voice and to stop tithing to the monarchy?
If they take our bodies and our votes, we have no recourse, save a violent one, no?
Not only will they have held our votes and vaginas hostage by 2024, they'll have captured the media with good old fashioned dollar bills.
GOPs get that talking heads matter and controlling the news cycle drives policy and decision making. It shouldn't, but it does, and dems refuse to see it.
The GOP keeps saying "we are going to fuck around and find out"––and then they do. Why are the dems always caught off guard, shocked by their lying, cheating ways?
Roxanne Gay also noted a few days ago in her essay "It's Time to Rage"
"In their joint statement, issued after the Supreme Court leak, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, did not use the word “abortion” even once. President Biden has barely uttered it during his presidency. It’s hard to believe they are as committed as they need to be to protecting a right whose name they dare not speak. Until the Democrats stop lounging in the middle of the political aisle — where no one is coming to meet them — nothing will change."
The patriarchy has spent decades and dollars silencing us, writing us out of the story, calling us "nasty" and whores. They strategically got everyone to hate the sound of our (nagging) voices. There's a reason why no one is talking about Tampon shortages. It should be code red (pun intended), but periods are "taboo." Meanwhile, the 2020 Toilet Paper shortage was reported on ad nauseum. No TP, defcon 5. No Tampons? S.O.L.
It's not just Manchin that has us all by the ovaries.
Old white men changed every rule to suit themselves, as they have for 600 years...But this time, they did it "legally" and gerrymandered the whole country, then stacked the court. They also control several women with financial contributions to their campaigns.
There is, of course, Aunt Lydia–ehem–I mean Senator Susan Collins, who claims shock that SCOTUS would ever do this. The senate should be forced to vote as the people want. 3/4 of Americans want this freedom. Why do 2 Americans get to take it away?
Maybe she didn't watch enough Handmaid's Tale like the rest of us. Maybe she read too much from Atwood's Guardian Op-ed or listened to too many white women who are complicit in their own oppression. Maybe she ignored the voices of Latinas and Black women, who have never received reproductive healthcare access or quality equal to that of white women.
Or maybe, Corporate Capture, money in politics, and the media have decided what is or isn't justice...because lord knows the average bro, which Kavanaugh is the poster child of, has no business deciding what's fair for our bodies, and apparently enough justices agreed that women's rights were not in fact human rights.
Don't you owe it to your voters, to not be such a tool for the patriarchy?
Intersectionality or Bust.
People like Collins would benefit from listening to the research (but maybe not by reading Atwood's Guardian op-ed which caused outrage when she said Roe being overturned, forcing childbirth was like slavery.)
White women (admittedly I include myself here, if just for a hot minute) did not immediately see the obvious issue with Atwood's piece. Understandably, many ADOS (American descendents of Slavery) women (and allies) were not happy with this comparison.
Whether you like her fiction or not, most pro-choice humans would agree:
We say that women “give birth”. And mothers who have chosen to be mothers do give birth, and feel it as a gift. But if they have not chosen, birth is not a gift they give; it is an extortion from them against their wills.
But, Atwood's bad take, comparing forced pregnancy and forced childbirth to slavery, is a reminder of why we must not have white women lead this movement alone (including mine).
Her Op-ed got too much attention and detracted from the real issue: patriarchal rule. Pitting women against each other is a deliberate tactic. The fighting between those of us who want reproductive freedom and those demanding reproductive justice is a distraction the patriarchy welcomes.
We end up debating each other rather than aligning because of weak allyship when it's not steeped in deep intersectionality. Meaning: our alignment fails when white women fail to back up the organizing and activist movements started and led by Black and Brown women.
White women cannot be the lead voice of 21st century feminism. Yes, we must all speak up, but white women should always take a beat, listen first, and center other's voices (one reason I published this months later.)
No one wants forced pregnancy. Period.
People already lived the nightmare of zero abortion access and terrible maternal healthcare: the majority of those who were already effed: Black women.
But the reality is that the U.S. has a history of this, along with forced sterilizations, always affecting people from marginalized, oppressed communities. This cannot be forgotten or brushed aside. We must utter this everytime we utter #MeToo.
Instead of being an afterthought, this should be our central argument. Not "We won't go back." as much as we shout "We cannot let this continue." We still have so much progress to make. People have suffered all along, while many white women benefited from the freedom to avoid back alley abortions, forced labor, and granted the privilege to outsource domestic labor.
Truth: More than half our nation's population has ZERO wealth by 2053, median Black household wealth is on a path to hit zero if nothing is done within next 8 years. Projections for 2063 racial minorities will comprise the majority of the nation’s population.
Truth: Thanks to gerrymandering, by 2040, 70% of our country will be represented by 30 Senators.
Truth: Out of 35 countries to work while raising a family the U.S. ranks 34th.
Truth: Americans have no universal healthcare, no universal childcare, face cutbacks on all social support systems, have states like Arizona gutting foster care funds,
Truth: Our nation continues to criminalize the poor.
Truth: Our government invests in war machines over vaccines. No stats needed.
Truth: We have less sex education than ever before. Only 6% of High School seniors are taught about using protection.
Truth: Spring 2022 Formula shortages were not prioritized. It took weeks for the government to act, while babies starved.
Truth: Diaper poverty is REAL and awful. "Parents cannot use federal aid to pay for diapers, and are often forced to come up with other solutions, using maxi pads or towels to keep their children clean and dry. In rural America where aid is even harder to access, tiny diaper banks are the only lifeline."
Truth: Period poverty is too.
Truth: We already have legal and illegal forced sterilization in our country for inmates, ICE immigrant detainees, and people with disabilities.
Truth: Inequality keeps growing. Per the latest Fed data, "the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth). 15x more....and white Americans hold nearly 85% of the nation’s wealth, versus just 4.1% for Black households."
Oftentimes, when we think about trauma, we think about it in the context of the personal, but we deal with collective traumas all of the time. We are currently in the second year of a collective trauma, a pandemic that, in the United States, has resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people. And most of us have no idea how to grapple with that level of loss, with the fact that nearly a million people have simply disappeared from our daily lives.
There are things that we really do need to sit with and spend more time with to fully make sense of. And so a lot of my current work is about, how do we reckon with these collective traumas?
I am often asked, particularly by young women, how they can be less angry in their writing, as if anger is a bad thing. And what I love to tell these women, and what I also remind myself, is that anger is oftentimes incredibly appropriate when you're writing about sexual violence, misogyny.
All of the issues that feminists are trying to address in our work, anger can be incredibly productive. And I hope to encourage them to find ways to use anger for the greater good and to see it as an asset, rather than a liability.
"The other thing I'll add is most people having abortions are already parenting, they know how hard it is and that there are limited resources. Abortion is a parenting decision." from culture study woman- truth Beth Robinson- Hawaii Life Director of Conservation and Legacy Lands, for now a real estate broker on Moku o Keawe, forever a writer and natural horsemanship advocate
For a Swear-Filled rage fest
Essay: The Seven Necessary Sins for Fighting Abortion Bans
Abortion is a human right, not a bonus or a reward we must earn
Patriarchy insists on controlling our mouths just as it insists it controls our wombs.
There is nothing polite about white supremacist patriarchy and the zealots it has installed on the Supreme Court, who are about to vote against a medical procedure that the majority of people in the U.S. believe should be the prerogative of the pregnant person.
There is nothing polite or civil about patriarchy.
Who benefits from upholding those social codes? Civility, decorum, manners and the like are used to uphold authority--patriarchy, whiteness, wealth, other forms of privilege--and we are urged to acquiesce in service to maintaining that authority.
We are not obligated to show respect to those in power. I refuse to allow those who don't recognize my full humanity by diminishing my bodily autonomy to expect politeness from me.
What would the world look like if the energy policing mouths and vaginas and wombs was invested instead into policing the very real harm of patriarchal violence? Abortion bans are patriarchal violence.
How ridiculous can this get, really?
Maybe we need Elle Woods. I mean she won her case.
"And for that matter all masturbatory emissions where his sperm clearly weren't seeking an egg could be termed reckless abandonment." ––Elle Woods, Legally Blonde
I'd already been thinking about this Elle Woods quote in Legally Blonde back in 2001 when I saw this piece recirculating on LinkedIn.
In 2017 BBC reported American's scary regression of our reproductive rights. "Texas lawmaker Jessica Farrar wants men fined for masturbating" discusses how Texas House Rep Farrar introduced a bill to criminalize being reckless with sperm via masturbation, but really she did so to show how bull shirt this all is.
"The last straw for her came with the most recent in a string of proposed bills, which she saw as chipping away at women's rights.
The latest wanted to force women to choose whether to bury or cremate the embryonic remains of either a miscarriage or abortion
It's not like we haven't already explored this from every single angle or tried to show their folly. They are perfectly straight faced when they say we have to decide what to do with the remains of a 6 week old fetus.
For a more sobering take, (and because they always do such a brilliant job, read the entire piece "Where Was Everyone? The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy," by Meagan Winter in Dissent magazine.
When Roe falls, there will be a public outcry. And yet the conservative movement has so successfully locked down structural power at nearly every level of government that even the most fervent activism around abortion rights will hit a hard ceiling, at least in the short term. The states are gerrymandered, the courts are stacked, and by 2040, 70 percent of Americans will be represented by just thirty senators.
While abortion rights were being hammered at the state level and the national conversation was becoming ever more vitriolic, where was everyone? For fifty years, women have been relying on reproductive healthcare and rights to participate in the workforce and support themselves and their families. One in four American women will have an abortion during her lifetime. According to a recent study by the New York Times, the typical patient seeking an abortion is already a mother, in her late twenties, and has completed some college. The prevalence of abortion means there isn’t a major business in the entire country that does not profit from the labor, talent, and spending of women who have had abortions. Every union and professional association has members who have relied on abortion care. Every university has students and faculty who have delayed or foregone parenthood to complete their education. Every one of us, whether or not we know it, has benefited from the work, care, and wisdom of people who have had abortions. And yet, despite these facts, nearly everyone has treated abortion rights as a siloed issue.
It wouldn’t have been so impossible for activists to push against abortion stigma had the subject been handled better by major media outlets, which tended to relegate abortion to women’s magazines or cover it as fodder for the horse race. National media covered high-profile court cases after legislation had already passed and it was too late for the public to weigh in. And, when the anti-abortion movement made the patently false claims that abortion causes debilitating regret and depression, infertility, and other complications, many news outlets fell back on false equivalencies and failed to distinguish between anti-abortion activists’ moral objections and their disinformation.
At the same time, leaders across many kinds of institutions failed to acknowledge publicly, openly, and without defensiveness or shame that abortion rights are a necessary condition to women’s participation in civic life. In the landmark 2015 gay marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges, hundreds of businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Facebook, and Google, filed amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage. The next year, in a major 2016 Supreme Court case over Texas abortion regulations, it was left to reproductive-rights interest groups, health associations, and individual women lawyers to plead for the importance of abortion rights.
I am not suggesting that big businesses are the ideal agents of social change—quite the opposite. Instead, I want to underscore that it’s emblematic of how our broader culture devalues women that corporations have almost never put their weight on the scale for abortion rights. Last year, after Texas passed its six-week abortion ban, fifty companies including Yelp, Lyft, and Ben & Jerry’s signed an open letter opposing the law. That was much too little, much too late. Meanwhile, corporations compensate their lowest-paid workers so insufficiently that financial stress—including not having healthcare or stable housing—is a major factor for some people deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy. At the same time, corporations staffed by educated professionals run on the expertise of people who have delayed or forgone parenthood or limited their number of children in order to finish college and work those jobs. Businesses directly benefit from women limiting their fertility, and yet for decades they have done almost nothing to advocate for reproductive healthcare, as if our collective ability to participate in civic life is an individual concern. The idea that women must shoulder their fertility as an individual problem is so pervasive that it’s the water we’re swimming in, and we can barely see it.
"After Dobbs is decided, it’s all but guaranteed that thousands more people will need assistance to get to abortion providers. Activists are poised to help, but they’re already unable to meet all the existing need. If abortion becomes illegal in wide regions of the country—as it probably will—and if the majority of Americans who support legal abortion continue to take for granted the myriad ways reproductive freedom has provided an invisible bedrock for our society, we’re going to repeat the failures of the past forty years. In post-Roe America, the struggle for reproductive justice cannot be someone else’s problem. "
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