When trying to think of an angle to write for Blog For Choice day, I was lucky enough to get this email from a reader asking me to look over a new attempt by Feminists For Life to recast anti-choice politics as somehow feminist-friendly, by arguing that allowing women to control their own fertility is a human rights violation. Now, I realize that most of us tend to think that “human rights violation” is traditionally about violating someone’s rights—their liberty, their freedom, their autonomy—and thus the argument that taking away women’s rights is saving women’s rights doesn’t quite make sense. But we’re from the old school feminist camp that believed that women are humans, with rights similar to those traditional human rights.

But FFL basically argues that we can’t frame women’s rights as human rights because women don’t have the agency to enjoy freedom.

However, we differ with Amnesty’s call upon all nations to ensure access to abortion for any woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape, sexual assault, or incest, and would strongly urge you to consider the concerns and perspectives expressed in this and subsequent paragraphs. FFL supports the protection of women from abortion, which is itself a form of violence against women, and for this reason we appreciate Amnesty’s consistent efforts to protect women from coerced abortion. We therefore urge you to reconsider this aspect of your recently adopted policy on abortion, which we believe does not protect the rights of women and children.

We understand that your position is one which advocates access to abortion particularly in countries where rape has been used as a deplorable tool of cultural oppression and where the pregnancy may produce further discrimination and even persecution. This position was captured well in one of your press releases: “…Our policy reflects our obligation of solidarity as a human rights movement with, for example, the rape survivor in Darfur who, because she is left pregnant as a result of the enemy, is further ostracised by her community.1″ However, abortion is not an expression of solidarity with this woman; it will in fact compound her suffering and is an endorsement of her community’s unjust view of her. The rape survivor in Darfur deserves much better than abortion.

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Prurience has always been a feature of anti-choice enforcement.

This is the first post for Pandagon’s new book club and our first selection is When Abortion Was A Crime by Leslie Reagan. Okay, now for the most important issue: Who else was excited to see Michael Bérubé name-dropped in the book?

With that out of the way, now for the important stuff. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a history of the century prior to Roe vs. Wade, when, as you can tell from the title, abortion was a crime. As Reagan demonstrates, though, the exact nature and meaning of the offense varied dramatically depending on the social circumstances, and most interestingly to me, depending on the levels of social interest in restoring and maintaining traditional gender roles. The crackdown on abortion rights in the late 19th century coincided with both a strong medical interest in shutting down midwifery and social panic about the trend of single young women moving to the city to live alone and work. Some things never change—wind up an anti-choicer for a rant and within roughly 5 minutes, she will end up invoking the wingnut symbol of pure evil, the TV show “Sex and the City”. In fact, I was deeply impressed at how the hysteria about abortions and single women in the 19th century resembled the same hysteria now; it’s not a coincidence that abortion rights are on the chopping block right as the country has tipped into the majority of adult women living without a husband.

The section on the 19th century also neatly refuted the claims made by Feminists For Life that because prominent, mainstream feminists of the era were opposed to abortion meant that “real” feminists should oppose abortion. Reagan shows how the anti-abortion sentiment from feminists showed the limits of their thinking; they bought into the belief that abortion was caused by men who couldn’t keep it in their pants and didn’t spend much time considering the fact that women might actually want to terminate pregnancies for their own reasons. Once it became understood that women terminate pregnancies for their own reasons, feminist thought on the issue did a complete about-face. These sort of changes over time don’t demonstrate a weakness of the movement, but its strength that it can change and grow over time with new information.

What was most fascinating about the book was the way that looking through the lens of abortion law and the enforcement of the law really tells you a lot about various eras of history. And therefore why it’s foolish to treat “women’s issues” as a minor concern that can be abandoned without hurting other liberal causes. People who wish to ban abortion tend to have an overall capitalist, racist, patriarchal package that they feel abortion bans promote.

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Crazy or just unwilling to put up with crap?

From the number of people who emailed me this article from the NY Times titled “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?”, it’s clear that there’s high demand for a blog post about it. Jill covered it really well, but basically the sum total is that there is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome, and the very idea that there is a post-abortion syndrome only has come to fruition because the ever-creative anti-choicers are seeking a way to reframe abortion as bad for women. To my mind, they don’t do a very good job of this because they are generally quite aware that abortion is a good thing if you need one, but that anyone who needs an abortion is undeserving of good things. So to try to turn that on its head and pretend they want women who get abortions to do anything but suffer is asinine.

Still, “post-abortion syndrome” obviously has enough hooks to make an examination of it worthy of the NY Times’ attention. And I think that the reason it does has everything to do with our culture’s long tradition of using diagnoses of mental illness as a way to punish and control women for rebellious behavior. From the article:

For Arias, however, abortion is an act she can atone for. And this makes it different from the many other sources of anguish in her past. As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepbrother, she told me. An older boy forced her to have sex when she was 14; seven months later, she says, she woke in the middle of the night to wrenching cramps and gave birth to a baby girl who was placed for adoption. A year later, Arias’s father, a bricklayer to whom she was close, plummeted from several stories of scaffolding to his death. She left home and fell out of touch with her mother and two brothers.

But she blames the abortion and only the abortion for her suffering, to which Jill says:

I feel truly sorry for the women who say they are experiencing post-abortion syndrome. And so perhaps this will sound cold, but I can’t but think that maybe they aren’t using their abortion as a catch-all for long histories of depression, anxiety, and often abuse and other problems. It makes sense, psychologically — abortion is something you can control, and if the rest of your life has been fully out of control, you can channel that pain inwards and deal with the one thing that you did. Further, many women who are going in to get abortions are in troubled situations anyway — at the very least, they’re pregnant when they don’t want to be pregnant. If that pregnancy was caused by abuse, or happened to a girl or woman from a strict anti-choice family, or happened to a woman who already suffered from depression, it logically follows that there will be some ongoing issues, and the abortion will be grouped in with that.

And these two passages demonstrate why “post-abortion syndrome” just makes sense to people who are deeply invested in traditional gender roles—and the notion that the only thing a woman can control is the only thing that could be the source of her mental illness is the issue at hand. And women controlling things is what alarms them and needs to be snuffed out.

Defining what makes something a mental illness has always been difficult and hazy to do, so there’s a long history of mental illness being defined strictly as deviance from expected norms, many of which are oppressive. With women in particular, there’s a long history of defining women as mentally ill because they reject male dominance and the “treatments” have been extremely punitive. The most famous example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “treatment” of being confined and her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” that was a fictionalized account of it. A good book to read on this is For Her Own Good, which chronicles a number of ways that perfectly healthy women have been labeled mentally ill in order to control and punish behaviors that undermine male dominance. Some examples off the top of my head—doctors used to excise the clitoris in order to “cure” masturbation, white girls in the 50s who got pregnant out of wedlock were pretty much monolithically described as neurotic (which helped make it easier to coerce them into giving up the baby), the popular assumption that “career women” are emotionally stunted, and now we have anti-choicers desperate to define getting an abortion as the cause of mental illness (and it appears their belief that abortion causes breast cancer feeds the notion that they view illness as god’s punishment for women who disobey).

This view that illness is caused by and a punishment for deviating from one’s assigned role as a subservient female is the very reason that out of the long, long list of problems, events and traumas in Rhonda Arias’ life, only one was considered a legitimate reason for her to be depressed, and that’s the abortion. That’s because her other problems—the rape, the abuse, the unwanted pregnancy, the being forced to give her baby up for adoption(which is linked, unlike abortion, to depression)—all cast her in her properly passive feminine role. Only by trying to take control of her situation is Arias violating gender norms, and so only in that will her conservative Christian buddies allow that she is mentally ill.

We know for a historical fact that this attitude that women’s mental illness is only real if she’s violating a gender norm has traditionally been a part of the dehumanization and degradation of women. Not only do you have the Victorian rest cure where mental health was seen as only existing in women who had been immobilized until their will was broken, you also have the notorious mother’s little helper era, where again you see sedation as the only legitimate “cure” for a woman’s health problems, because they are only considered problems if they disrupt an oppressive system. Taken to its logical conclusion, things like rape are not problems unless they upset the men in control of the rape victim—an attitude much in evidence with the way Arias is being treated by her Christian buddies, who have convinced her that a long history of sexual assault is nothing compared to being a bad woman who has abortions in terms of trauma.

And drank the wingnut Kool-aid!

This article about Patricia Heaton in the NY Times is mostly sympathetic, but it’s still an interesting article in that it exposes so very well how untenable wingnut notions about womanhood are for the wingnuts themselves. It’s also noticeable because the word “wingnut” has wormed its way onto the theatre pages of the NY Times.

And then there is her un-wingnutlike desire for conciliation.

But the main point of interest is that Heaton is, unsurprisingly, not able to grasp some of the big contradictions in her way of thinking, and that a combination of not getting it and not wanting to get it makes her a grade A hypocrite from the get-go.

For those familiar only with Ms. Heaton’s light comedy or political profile, her gale-force performance and her gleeful way with the obscenity-packed dialogue may come as a surprise. This is, after all, the same woman who walked out of the 2003 American Music Awards telecast, before her scheduled appearance, in disgust over the language and behavior of some presenters.

I for one am not even remotely surprised. “X for me but not for thee,” is the mantra of your average social conservative. You think a single person squawking about how it’s not oppression to keep “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance would hesistate to flip a lid if someone changed it to “under Allah” for their classroom? True, there could be some context issues that make the Music Awards and Heaton’s new play somehow different, but considering the source, the difference is probably, “Well, I need the work now.”

Heaton comes out in favor of gay rights and contraception use in this article, which is nice, but again, since she puts her name to an organization (Feminists for Life) that won’t even consider endorsing contraception and sex education as prevention for abortion (when they claim to be all about preventing abortion), then I remain unimpressed by her. Saying you’re all for contraception in theory doesn’t do anyone much good when you join an abortion “prevention” organization that won’t even go so far as to suggest contraceptive use, which is by far the best real world prevention for abortion.

But the most interesting thing about this article isn’t really classified as hypocrisy so much as a more telling unwillingness to see what her worldview really is all about.

And she is not, in person, prudish or judgmental. Most of her friends have had abortions, she said, and they’re still her friends.

It isn’t so much her views that cause her trouble as her unwillingness to finesse them for public consumption. She is compulsively honest, though she feels that’s not so much a virtue as “an illness, like Tourette’s.â€? Even her more extreme positions are stated without hedging: If it were up to her, she said, there would be no abortion for any reason. But she offers such thoughts with a sense of helplessness, as if she were trapped by the implications of her core principles…..

That’s a big if. Most of the dialogue, Ms. Heaton said, has been brutal: “People saying they hope my kids get sick and die so I’ll know what it’s like to need medical research.�

An utter lack of self-awareness, there. On one hand, she sees no problem running around advocating for laws that, by her own admission that she has friends who’ve had abortions, would have quite likely been the ruin of her friends’ lives, at least some of them. Not that I think it’s appropriate to tell her that you want her kids to die, but anti-choicers have to face up to the fact that they are running around telling women—women they know and love, often—that they want the government to force us to have children against our will.

Then there was this small thing that bugged me.

In her 2002 book, “Motherhood and Hollywood� (Villard), less a celebrity memoir than a collection of spiky, self-deprecating essays, she described herself as a “5-foot-2 runt� whose stomach, “after four C-sections and too many years of nursing,� had become “a big old wrinkly suede bag hanging down,� and whose breasts “had to be folded up like origami� to fit into strapless gowns. Now she looks toned and lovely.

It’s worth noting that Heaton has, through plastic surgery, symbolically erased a lot of the outward physical effects of the very repeated child-bearing that she and her FFL cohorts would force by law on those of us who do not have the money to have a doctor come in and fix us up to look like we did prior to child-bearing. It’s a small thing (though worth noting also that the dramatic physical changes of childbirth are nothing to sneeze at a lot of the time, which is one more reason it should be a choice), but a critical demonstration of how classist the anti-choice viewpoint really is. Heaton’s money shielded her from some of the effects that child-bearing has on your looks, which matters to her job in any case. But she doesn’t stop to wonder how unfair it is to push mandatory child-bearing on people who don’t have the financial cushion she does to mediate some of the effects that it has on your job, your life, and even your body.

And that’s passing yourself off as a feminist when you’re anything but.

It’s a legitimate question after going through their entire series of supposedly “Pro-Woman Answers for Pro-Choice Questions”. The last email has been sent off, and Foster is hoping we’ve learned something, preferably how to shut off your brain and turn into a right wing automan.

I hope that reading my “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice QuestionsTMâ€? has given you fresh perspectives on a contentious debate.

My thanks to all who took the time to respond. We are grateful for the many thoughtful and heartfelt comments and suggestions we received.

Were you able to internalize the answers?

Love the choice of the word “internalize”. Not think about, not understand, but internalize. Serrin Foster is noteworthy for how she does such a half-assed job at pretending to be a feminist. If she knew the first thing about feminism, she’d know that feminists use the word “interalize” a lot, and it’s pretty much always a bad thing—you’ve internalized misogyny or internalized the patriarchy, but you don’t internalize like love of puppies or something like that. She’s tipped her hand with this one, inadvertently indicated that the best she can hope for is not that one really thinks about being anti-choice and concludes that it’s the right position through thinking about it. Mostly because you can’t. At best, being anti-choice is bound up in irrationality and misdirection with a thick layer of sentimentality over it to keep you from really thinking about the issues.

Foster just lines up the previous Feminists for Life questions. If you’ll recall, I began covering the Feminists for Life questions in hopes that they would address preventing abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancy, but as we’ve learned, Feminists for Life is no different from any other anti-abortion organization and they oppose or ignore contraception use altogether. We’ve learned a lot, mostly that Feminists for Life is not a feminist organization, because any true feminist organization would, bare minimum, understand that not all women are identical and have the identical goal of having a megaton of babies, as Feminists for Life assumes they must.

Just remember that the basis for any answer should be: Remember the woman as well as the child.

How does Feminists for Life remember women? Do they remember disabled women who they would ban from getting abortions when not doing so could kill them? No. Do they remember rape victims who will be traumatized twice if forced to bear their rapist’s baby? No. Do they remember women who don’t want to bear a child just to relinquish it? No. Do they remember women who find out that their fetuses have died in utero and now they have to walk around with a corpse rattling around inside them because it’s illegal to remove it under an abortion ban? No. Do they remember women who simply don’t want to have children? No. Do they remember women who’ve had children and don’t want more? No. Do they remember women who want children in the future, but just not right now? No.

Once you’ve eliminated all the women that Feminists For Life don’t remember, there aren’t many left. There are indeed a handful of women out there who want to have dozens of children until their bodies give out, but that’s not the majority of women. Real feminists remember all women, not just the teeny tiny minority who behave like you want them to.

Big questions remain — not just for a woman considering abortion, but for us.

What do we do to raise expectations that will make a real difference for women?

Interestingly, throughout this entire series, they are sly and devious about what they intend to do, which is ban abortion and, in the long run, contraception. That would make a big difference for women, but it wouldn’t be a “feminist” difference. You can slap a big bow on a box of shit, but that doesn’t make it chocolate truffles.

How can we transform our society into one that that celebrates womanhood, supports mothers, honors fathers, and cherishes every new life?

Interestingly, the facts show that there’s one big factor—when people can choose when they have children, they have better lives and happier families.

This part makes me think that Foster is aware that I’m reviewing her letters:

That may sound ridiculous in an age where sassy put-downs make someone the media darling of the moment. Sure, that can make anyone feel smug and satisfied in the short run.

But does it help create the solutions women need?

No, but it certainly helps stop people who are trying to hurt women like Feminists for Life is.

A minor change in this week’s answers for pro-choicers from Feminists for Life—they’ve finally moved their bullshit online so everyone can see it! Now you too can see how they answer the most important question, which is what they’re doing to reduce the abortion rate from the front end by agitating for comprehensive sex education and free contraception. And that answer is:

So even though they claim to be an organization dedicated to rooting out the “root causes” of abortion—and there’s only one, which is unwanted pregnancy—they haven’t even taken the first step in that direction. It’s because they’re too busy exploiting disabled people to create the illusion that abortion is selfish. Disability—what if the fetus is or could be disabled?

If actual or potential disability is a reason to devalue children before birth, what cruel message does this send to persons with disabilities who are already born?

Would you say to someone in a wheelchair that s/he should never have been born? That’s the message people get when they talk about “gross fetal anomalies.”

How many artists, musicians, writers with disabilities or no fault brain disease have enriched our world? Would artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings have had a bigger impact if he were taller in stature? What would our world be like without the contributions of artist Van Gogh, musician Beethoven, or writer Sylvia Plath?

Interestingly, Van Gogh, Beethoven, and Sylvia Plath all had disabilities that were not evident in the womb. They’re not even putting a half-assed effort into this, which goes to show how little they care about the stickier issues involving disability rights. By bringing up people who became disabled as they aged due, most likely, to external factors, they’re trying to imply that pro-choicers are somehow running around demanding that we euthanize already existing people, which is untrue.

The ugly truth is that abortion rights does mean that some people, when they find out their child would be born with a birth defect, would terminate the pregnancy. And while that it truly upsetting, the cure is to educate people on disabilities and remove the stigma so that fewer people feel they have no choice. But stripping women of basic rights is not an answer. Freedom means that people will often make choices that aren’t what many of us would like. Instead of stripping them of their right to make certain choices—like not to have a disabled child—it’s better to persuade than limit a critical freedom.

Interestingly, while FFL was all about how easy it is to give your baby away if you can’t care for her last week, they seem to forget that the ban on abortion they seek would mean that disabled children would be put up for adoption as well. The problem is the choice not to adopt means that unfortunately, some people will decide that they aren’t prepared to care for a disabled infant, which was well-noted in the comments at the last thread as their right. I don’t see any language in here about how FFL is prepared to strip people of their right not to adopt while they strip women of our right not to give birth.

Anyway, I’ve addressed the fallacy of the “what if you were never born?!” argument, which, taken to its logical conclusion, means that every person not trying to make a baby this very second is a murderer. And while the fact that everyone wants a perfectly healthy baby is a wrinkle in this situation, I’m not convinced at all that it’s a big enough wrinkle to matter. For one thing, the potential of your child being born with a disability is just one of many factors that lead people to decide not to have a baby right now. I know that there’s a good possibility that if I had a kid, that child would be a larger burden than usual because she would very likely inherit my severe childhood asthma, which is genetic in my family. Is that a factor in my decision not to have children? Probably in the abstract, but mostly because I don’t want children anyway. I suspect that if I did want kids, I would decide to roll with it if that happened.

And that’s why choice is an individual decision and can’t be addressed by the law. Most people’s decisions about child-bearing have many factors, not just one, as this FAQ that FFL has put together implies. To single out disability is to refuse to look at the big picture—a woman with health insurance for her newborn, for instance, is in a much different position than one without when considering whether or not to risk having a baby that could have massive health problems. The cure for that is not to ban abortion, but make sure there’s no babies being born uninsured.

What I find interesting about FFL invoking disability though, is they ignore the “pro-woman” question with regards to reproductive rights and disability. So I’m going to ask it anyway.

Disability—what if the pregnant woman is or could be disabled?

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Part #9 in a continuing series on the anti-feminist, anti-choice organization Feminists For Life. Serrin Foster pretends to address feminist concerns about abortion bans; I make fun of her and shoot down her lies. This week’s topic is a doozy for those of us who actually don’t want children to suffer, so get your mouth protection against grinding your teeth at the callousness involved: What about all those kids in foster care that nobody wants?

Good question! Why bring more unwanted babies into the world when there’s already a huge problem getting homes for the babies there are? The callousness of anti-choicers towards abandoned children is legendary and gives lie to their whole notion that they are in this because they love babies. Foster, as you can imagine, dodges the question.

Many of the children waiting to be adopted are waiting because of legal processes, not a lack of loving homes. There are two million pre-approved American couples awaiting adoption. Two million women want to be mothers right now, and many of them want more than one child, as well as wanting children with special needs.

According to people who aren’t lying to you for sleazy anti-woman reasons, this isn’t true at all. It’s true that there are a lot of couples out there looking to adopt, but the idea that it’s strictly a numbers game is easily disproven. Turns out that quite a few of those two million couples go wanting because they have very exacting standards about what their child must be like—and the biggies are healthy and white.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services estimates that as many as 127,000 children in foster care needed adoptive families. The ethnic backgrounds of these children are as follows:

* 42% were African American
* 32% were White
* 15% were Hispanic
* 1% were Native American/Alaskan Native
* 1% were Asian/Pacific Islander
* 8% were of unknown/unable to determine ethnic backgrounds

The average mean age of children waiting to be adopted is 7.9 years. More than 70% of the children are under the age of 11.

42% of children languishing in foster care needing to be adopted are black, way out of proportion to the larger population, which is 12% black. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the stigma against interracial adoptions is a huge factor.

This heart-wrenching concern for the woes of parents who want to adopt but have to go without is at the core of many an anti-choicer’s worldview. Massively increasing the number of unwanted children bouncing around without stable homes is but a small price to pay to address the concerns of white, middle class couples who can’t get healthy babies that look like them. The end game is reviving the practice of hiding teenage girls in group homes if they got pregnant and then forcing them to give up their babies for adoption before coming home to act as if nothing happened. In fact, that’s what the network of “crisis pregnancy centers” will morph into if Roe is overturned—a series of intake places to separate the teenage girls likely to give birth to babies desired to adoption from those who aren’t white enough to pass muster. They’ve already started, in fact. No doubt this increased the number of the desired white, healthy newborns up for adoption, but no one who actually cares about girls and women would desire a return to this traumatizing practice. It’s not worth it.

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After many edits and bouts in committee, the eventual caption on the shirt was but a pale shadow of the original, more accurate caption: “Be a tool.”

Image from Lionhearted Apparel, an inaccurately named company that is part and parcel of this whole attempt to turn Christianity, a religion based around a gentle man who preached peace, into a religion of hypermasuline war-mongering. Naturally, 10% of their profits got to anti-choice charities. Because there’s no greater threat to Christian manhood that women who decline to have their bodies conquered by the all-powerful sperm. (Hat tip to bellatrys for the link.)

Which leads me to today’s topic, which is the next email from Feminists For Life. (One day, this series will get a front page Google ranking. Maybe a Google bombing when it’s done?) Today’s topic is: Isn’t feminism about a woman having rights equal to those of a man? Place your bets on whether or not Serrin Foster is going to weasel in her answer or be straightforward.

Feminism is much more than that.

As a teen, I remember the electrifying call for equality during the ’70’s women’s movement, and how it challenged and changed the nation. The idea was so compelling it still circles the world.

By definition, equality is a principle extended to all. When one group of people gets their rights at the expense of another, there is nothing equal about it.

Nice sentiment. So here’s the question: If Foster thinks that women should have equal rights to men, then why does she oppose women having equal rights to medical treatment and, in the larger sense, does she think that women have the equal right that men do to bodily autonomy? Right now, men have a legal right not to have someone else commandeer their body for nutrition. So, if you’re for equality, then you assume that women should have that right as well.

The foundation of feminism is built on the basic tenets of nonviolence, nondiscrimination, and justice for all. Abortion is discrimination based on age, size, location, and sometimes gender, disability, or parentage.

Discrimination based on “location”, huh? Some feminist, that she thinks that a woman’s body just happens to be where the fetus is hanging out. Not so—it’s biologically a parasite. Now, that makes the sentimentalists moan and groan, but parasitic relationships can be totally great if that’s what you want. But if you don’t want a parasite, by god, that parasite doesn’t have a right to be there. For the more slow-witted people in the audience, Bluey can explain it to you. That said, there’s no right not to be discriminated against because of “location”. I doubt even an anti-feminist like Foster would argue that rapists are being discriminated against because of where their penises just happened to be. I suspect that the largely Republican leadership of FFL is big on property rights and certainly thinks you have a right to toss someone out of your house if you don’t want them there.

And it is often the result of a more insidious form of discrimination: the lack of resources and support that pregnant women need and deserve.

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The nice thing about being pro-choice is you have the breathing room that intellectual honesty and consistency affords a person. All your views on the subject of reproductive rights stem from the simple notion that women are fully human. Should a woman get to have sex without “consequences”? Should a woman be free to choose how many children she has? Should a woman who’s been raped be forced to bear her rapist’s child? Should a woman who has a pregnancy with complications be forced to ruin her health or lose her life? The answers are all fairly straightforward and simple when you believe a woman deserves basic human rights.* To be fair, anti-choicers are pretty consistent in their worldview, too—they believe that women are second to men, that women should be punished for having sex, and that pregnancy is god’s way of enforcing women’s second class status. They are extremely consistent in this view. In all but their rhetoric. For some reason, anti-choicers cannot advance an intellectually consistent position, jumping all around the place, casting about for some other reason than the real ones that they have the policy goals that they have.

It’s tough to say why this is, but I suspect the reason might be similiar for the reasons that BushCo claimed, at various times, that we’re in Iraq to advance democracy, stop terrorism, take out some non-existent weapons of mass destruction, or because it makes puppies happy.**

One of the most irritating intellectual inconsistencies of anti-choicers is that they assert that they are anti-choice because of “life” and yet their big project over the past few years is passing and defending a federal ban on a specific abortion procedure called a D&X. This is the sort of ban that will not save a single life but could in fact take many, since the reason D&Xes are used by doctors rather than other procedures is because they feel it’s safer in some circumstances. The policy is effectively anti-life, unless you secretly believe that women don’t count and you don’t care if you get some of them killed in your pursuit to erode women’s rights. Scott Lemieux has an article up at the American Prospect detailing exactly how stupid this ban is and why the Supreme Court will probably approve it anyway, now that it’s headed up by judges who don’t care about niceities like clear, consistent arguments when it comes to hurting women. Highly recommended. Needless to say, the other asinine intellectual inconsistency that will result from all this is that “federalist” legislators and judges—all who claim they want to leave these issues up to the states—are all eagerly signing onto federal anti-woman legislation. But you’ll rarely catch them admitting this.

The downside to siding with the coherent folks is that sometimes you feel a bit sorry for the anti-choicers, with their wildly inconsistent positions. (We’re for life except when it’s a pregnant woman’s! We want women to resort to the coathanger because we just respect them so much!) They get called out on the fact that they’re sleazy liars who won’t be straight about their views on such a regular basis that it’s almost unfair that they don’t get to flip that shit around on their opposition. Not that they don’t try, of course, but such attempts are so dreadfully weak it gives me a pity rush. I got a trackback from a woman defending “Feminists” for Life who wants to tell the world what feminists are really like.*** She’s found us out—we’ve committed the dreadful sin of being just what we say we are, which is supportive of women’s full rights and therefore of the idea that women are a diverse group with diverse desires.

Confronting such intellectual consistency apparently gave Sharon a shock to the system, because she totally mistakes it for the sort of disingenous bullshitting that her side engages in.

I despise what Pandagon calls feminism because it tends to be selfish self-centered BS focused entirely on personal pleasure versus what used to be known as caring about family and society. I think it’s very telling when someone says that they want an abortion (but presumably didn’t mind the process of creating a baby) because they just don’t want kids. It definitely flies in the face of the way NARAL and NOW describe women facing abortion:

While it’s critical to promote policies that help prevent unintended pregnancies and make abortion less necessary, NARAL Pro-Choice America also fights to protect the right to safe, legal abortion.

How, I’m not sure. I read this statement up and down and didn’t see anywhere that NOW or NARAL advocated for the idea that women with unwanted pregnancies should be forced to have the babies as punishment for not being proper women who wants lots of babies. It says something about protecting legal abortion while reducing its necessity by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Unless Sharon thinks that I said that I really enjoy getting pregnant a few times a year because I love nothing better than a painful, expensive abortion, her notion that she’s “caught” me makes no sense. Going back to the intellectual consistency of pro-choicers—we believe women are fully human and deserve a right to control their bodies. This actually means they have a right to prevent unwanted pregnancy as well as terminate it. Interestingly, it’s not the feminists who want to take away the right to prevent unwanted pregnancy. The major organizations that want to increase the abortion rate by increasing unwanted pregnancy through contraceptive deprivation are all the anti-abortion groups. Talk about inconsistent! They say they’re against abortion but want to increase the rate.

The funniest part of this entire rant, for my purposes, is that Sharon claims that feminists both scramble to get abortions left and right while stating at the exact same time that we don’t mind the process of creating a baby. Which is it? To me, the stated eagerness to terminate pregnancies seems to contradict the stated adoration of being pregnant, which is of course the process that creates babies. Do we hate pregnancy or love it? Who knows, but the important part is to know that feminists are all the same and whether that means they love pregnancy or hate it, they are evil, wicked, man-hating beasts. Who are selfish.

Of course, there’s the outside chance that Sharon doesn’t understand biology and in her eagerness to imply that feminists are sluts, she mistakenly said conflated the process of creating a baby with Teh Sex. If so, it’s kind of cute that she can’t bring herself to say that a woman could actually want sex, just that we sluts don’t mind it like good women should. Regardless, this notion that sex and not pregnancy is the process that creates a baby makes me wonder if she’s quite aware of what an abortion even is, since it has to happen during that pregnancy phase, where Sharon seems to think that as soon as you light up that post-coital cigarette a bassinet pops up at the end of your bed and starts emitting baby wails, much like on “The Sims”. And hell, even in “The Sims” you only got a baby once out of every few times you had sex and in the real world, a lot of us manage to go years having Teh Sex without ever even beginning the baby-making process called “pregnancy”. My inclination is to point to this entire misunderstanding of what the process of baby-making is as further evidence that science education in America is sorely wanting. How can they even work up to evolution when so many people don’t know where babies come from?

*For the dumbasses who don’t get it, the proper answers are: Yes, yes, no, and no.
**This might be why we’re going to invade Iran. I can’t keep the bullshit straight.
***Interestingly enough, by slamming the existence of feminism while defending FFL, she inadvertantly admitted that FFL is not feminist.

Part #7 of my continuing series demonstrating that Feminists For Life are not feminists so much as a right wing front organization, using their email series “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions”. Today’s email is basically a no-brainer: So you believe that a tiny speck—a zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus—has rights over a woman?

Well, obviously they do, at least in the sense that they think that zygote or blastocyst has more right to a woman’s body than the woman does. And since they’re cagey about contraception and much of their membership is against it, they clearly think that individual sperm have more right to a woman’s body for their mission in life than she has to it. But that’s not really the question they’re answering, I found out. The question they’re answering is much closer to: “Do you believe that all women are eager to have one baby after another, and that no women actually might sincerely not want to be having a baby right now or ever?” And the reason I say this is their answer starts like this:

Women aren’t stupid. We know it’s a baby that is growing just like we did in our mother’s wombs. That is why most women who feel they have emotional and financial support don’t have abortions.

It’s true. Women aren’t stupid and the reason they get abortions is because they know what’s growing inside them will turn into a baby one day. And they don’t want to have one, a possibility that FFL denies outright with their attempts to claim that abortions are primarily caused by lack of emotional or financial support. My feeling is they invoke the hazy notion of “emotional support” to explain away why so many women like me have the financial means to have a baby but simply won’t do it—the reasoning then would be that I don’t have the “emotional support”, i.e., if my man was more patriarchal and patronizingly took care of me in exchange for subservience, I would suddenly have a light go on in my head and want babies. But that’s just my guess. Maybe they’ll clarify this in future installments.

Back to the “why most women have abortions” thing, though. From ema, I found that there are actually statistics out there about why women get abortions, which means that if FFL is right and most women who get abortions would not do so if they had more support, then the statistics should reflect this. As ema says, that’s not really true:

For example, in a 2004 study (.pdf) [o]f the 1,160 women who gave at least one reason, 89% gave at least two and 72% gave at least three; the median number of reasons given was four, and some women gave as many as eight reasons out of a possible 13…. Looking just at the three most frequently mentioned reasons for having an abortion, in 44% of cases [Not ready for a(nother) child/timing is wrong (25%); Have completed my childbearing/have other people depending on me/children are grown (19%)] there’s no evidence that increasing economic support would have an effect. (It’s possible that more funds for more effective contraception, or improved access would have an impact on these groups, but that’s just speculation at this point.) By contrast, for the 23% of respondents who mentioned Can’t afford a baby now as a reason for their decision, increased economic support might be effective in reducing the abortion rate.

Here’s the charts from the study. On this first one, remember that the patients were allowed to check off as many as they felt were applicable.

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The new “feminism”. (Poster by Austin Cline.)

Do women, inferior beings to men in the eyes of Jeebus, have agency? Are we full enough adults to make our own decisions about the production output of our uteruses? Or are we mental children who need a male-dominated government to tell us what to do?

You can guess what the opinion of “Feminists” for Life on the subject of female moral agency is: We don’t have it. The latest email from their “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” tackles the subject at the heart of the reproductive rights debate. Don’t you respect women enough to allow them to make a choice? and, as a follow-up to demonstrate that they don’t respect motherhood either, If you don’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? The answer to the first one for FFL is simple: In order to be “free”, women have to have our freedom stripped from us.

Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,” but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.

My emphasis on that bit of Orwellian language, since they are very much about coercing women into bearing children against our will. But that’s okay, because really, “free will” is an illusion.

In the world of these “feminists”, women aren’t comparable to men so much as comparable to barnyard animals. We can have legal freedom, sure, but what for? Women do not have free will, but are instead instinctual creatures, and if we think that we don’t want to have one child after another, it’s because we’ve been perverted from our own instincts and need the law to set us right.

Do men have free will, in the view of FFL? Absolutely. Prior installments made it quite clear that they think a lot of women have abortions because men in their lives choose to abandon them. They do not assume these abandonments are coerced. So they think that men can make free choices, but women cannot, which strikes me as something that makes them fundamentally incompatible with the feminist movement.

We support nonviolent choices—single motherhood, fatherhood, grandparenthood, marriage and various adoption options—along with practical resources and support.

Except they support the choice of using violence if necessary to force women to bear children against our will. Think I’m overstating the case? Well, remember that all government force is ultimately at the end of a gun.

A society that promotes abortion as a “necessity� or “necessary evil� underestimates women and the violence of abortion and disregards what women really want.

Like I said in the last installment, if I were pregnant, I’d want an abortion. What say these feminists to this evidence that women might really want not to have children right now? I suppose I simply don’t exist, which calls into question how I typed these words.

Now for the second question, If you don’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? It’s an interesting question, because while most anti-choicers idealize motherhood, their assumption that it’s to be performed by people they assume have the moral agency of barnyard animals insinuates that parenting is a task beneath real humans, i.e. men, and to be performed by subhuman Uterine-Americans.

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See the end of the post for out exciting conclusion!

On the last installment of me-dealing-with-Feminists for Lifes’s email series “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions”, I pointed out that their basis for being “feminist” was a stated opposition to coercion, which sounds feminist until you realize that they’re only opposed to coercion if the final result—an abortion—is not what they want. They are happy to coerce women into having children against our will. They’ve spent the whole series trying to come up with reasons women have abortions, as if all women naturally want to have baby after baby and if they don’t, there must be something wrong with them. In a free society, there’s only one reason that counts as to why women have abortions: they are pregnant and don’t want to be. FFL has dealt, often through outright lies, with some of these reasons women might not want to be pregnant. If they were real feminists, though, they’d probably figure the reasons women might not want to turn their body over to pregnancy at any point in time are as diverse as women themselves.

Knowing that they have to deal with this to appear “feminist”, this week’s email is: What if she just doesn’t want it?

Sounds about right to me. Some of us just don’t want children or more children or children now. I’m one of those who doesn’t want them, period. Granted, I take the necessary precaution of using contraception, but FFL won’t address the effectiveness of contraception as an abortion-preventative. And anyway, sometimes contraception fails and you need abortion as a back-up plan. FFL might sound all soft and cozy invoking women who are poor and need financial assistance to have babies they do want, and that’s great if they’re sincere, but that doesn’t change the basic fact that they are out to get women like me who don’t want kids and don’t want the government choosing for us.

What say these “feminists” to me?

Guttmacher Institute statistics show that there are reasons, often financial or emotional, why a woman feels she must have an abortion. We must work toward the systematic elimination of the reasons that coerce women into an abortion.

Right off the bat, they refuse to answer their own question! I don’t want my desire not to have kids to be “eliminated”, because it’s not borne out of troubling circumstances but actually just a function of my personality, which is not up for discussion.

We oppose abortion in all cases because violence is a violation of basic feminist principles.

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Before I get into this, big time spokeswoman for Feminists for Life Patricia Heaton is now showing up in ads shilling against stem cell research. This series of posts is mostly about how Feminists for Life is not feminist at all, but Heaton’s involvement with blocking research that could save the lives of real human beings, not just hypothetical ones, demonstrates that not only are anti-choicers not feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but they are also not “pro-life”.

Part four in my ongoing series of blogging about Feminists for Life’s email series “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions”. I read these “feminists” so you don’t have to. This week’s installment still doesn’t answer the question that I’ve been interested in from the beginning, which is what this “feminist” organization is doing to minimize abortions while helping women out in a way that’s been shown to be effective, which is increasing contraceptive use and access. For some reason, this “feminist” organization is a little cagey about their stance on preventing unwanted pregnancy.

The project of receiving and debunking each email was beginning to feel tedious to me, and I wondered if it was worth it. Do we really need a thorough refutation to this bullshit? Luckily, Tristero put up a post that convinced me we do, because without people calling bullshit on this stuff, it gets traction in the mainstream media. He nailed exactly what it is about things like Feminists For Life or intelligent design “theory” that get them attention in the mainstream and why they need to be thoroughly debunked.

Christianists, like other rightwing extremists, have studied non-christianist American society very carefully. Proof? Their utilization of liberal phrases, like “free expression” or “equal rights” is one example. They then upend the conventions, throw in some obscure facts, sprinkle it with lies, and poof, they’ve given the impression that they know what they’re talking about and that their position has been thoughtfully considered. The result: they confuse the news media into permitting them to spew their propaganda unimpeded, as the media has a bias towards presenting all points of view that appear to have stature.

The letter I address tonight is a classic example of this. FFL is imitating feminist language to promote anti-feminist ideas. In today’s email, they take a strong stance against the coercive nature of poverty, which sounds feminist until you remember that FFL is only opposed to coercion if the coercion is towards a behavior they don’t like. They fully support forcing women to have children against their will. Like IDers, they have learned how to dress up their wolf-like arguments in enlightened sheeplike clothing, but only just well enough to get on TV, but not well enough to handle any real scrutiny. I hope this series of blog posts can be a resource guide in the future against this tactic.

It’s important to keep in mind that the anti-choicers believe that all women want as many children as they can have, and that any woman who says differently has mental problems. Which brings me to the anti-feminist fallacy behind what looks more feminist about FFL, which is their stated support for legal infrastructure to help women have children. This week’s question is: What if her partner, friends or family have abandoned her? Or what if she is poor?

Lack of support often coerces women into abortion. As pro-life feminists, we choose to support and empower women rather than abandon women.

This is a blatant lie. FFL only chooses to support and empower women who fit their criteria of a good woman, which is one that wants to have as many babies as she can. If the support you need is to get an abortion, you’re shit out of luck.

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I’ve gotten my 3rd email from FFL in the series “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” and it’s almost too depressing to blog it. As in prior installments, I’m still waiting for FFL to get around to what should be the number one priority of a “feminist” organization that is anti-abortion, which is reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies in the first place by advocating for free contraception and plenty of sex education. As you can imagine, the 3rd version is more dithering and avoiding this issue. Instead, they want to talk about the question: What about “the life of the motherâ€??

Why the scare quotes around “the life of the mother”? Good question. My theory is, after reading this horrible email, that they don’t think of pregnant women as having “lives”. They don’t want to screw up the precious word “life”, which is code for Sperm Magic, by mucking it up by insinuating that the incubating devices for the children of men have anything resembling “life”.

Since we are both pro-woman and pro-life, we refuse to choose between women and children.

So if you’re going to die, too bad. FFL refuses to choose. Luckily, I’m here to remind you that currently it’s not their fucking choice to make. It’s still yours.

Since they can’t just write women off completely (stupid “feminist” in the name), they do address the actual issue. Their answer to the question of what about the life of the mother is the same as Bill O’Reilly’s: Pregnancy isn’t dangerous and dead women tell no tales. Also, while they’re no doctors, they know better than your doctor. He may tell you you’re going to die, but FFL knows better:

Thankfully, medical advancements continue to save more lives. Situations in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother are extremely rare. Late-term abortions are never medically necessary. Emergency C-sections are often the medically appropriate response to save both mother and child. Viability at this stage of the child’s development is generally very good, especially with advances in neonatal care. Babies who weigh just under a pound are surviving!

As for first-trimester scenarios, most are to save the mother from ectopic (“out of place�) pregnancies, which typically occur in the Fallopian tube. Surgeries for ectopic pregnancies are not medically classified as abortions. Since the child has no chance of survival, and the mother can survive if the pregnancy is ended, we must do what we can to save her. To let both die would not be pro-life. At this time uterine transplants to re-implant the baby into the womb are not possible.

I’ve got no answer on why they didn’t just lie ectopic pregnancies away or pretend they have “uterine transplants” while they’re lying about other things like how super-safe C-sections are and the non-existence of pre-eclampsia.

Now that there’s a chance of Roe getting overturned, the anti-choicers are showing their true colors more and more all the time. Lying is just a way of life for them, I suppose. This is how low they’ll sink, feeding women medical disinformation that, if women fall for it, could actually kill them one day. “Pro-life” my ass.

Since this one is a depressing vat of irresponsible and dangerous lies, I’m going to just provide you with an antidote of link-farming:

Adele M. Stan at The American Prospect is also smoking out FFL as the anti-feminist organization it is.

Tbogg is hashing it out with the Casters of Shame, who’ve called him “intolerant” because he correctly noted that they’re liars.

From Feministing, an article about the genuinely pro-woman atmosphere at the profiled abortion clinic.

“When Anthony Met Stanton” by A.E. Ted Aub

The NY Times probably only throws people who still have their wits about them a bone once in awhile to make us compliant, sort of like the good cop/bad cop routine, but no matter—I’m tickled beyond belief that not only did they run a refutation to anti-choice claims that they’re the true heirs of the suffragists (as opposed, of course, to modern feminists), but that the refutation is so scathing. And by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff, no less.

The impetus for the op-ed is the travesty that is Feminists For Life buying Susan B. Anthony’s house in order to bolster their credibility as a “feminist” organization, though they quite clearly aren’t. But the line that FFL is selling is one you’ll see popping up from all sorts of anti-feminist women, that they’re the “real” feminists because they could swear that the suffragists of old were anti-abortion. That argument is ahistorical, of course—for one thing, 19th century feminists were certainly not all of the same mind on these issues. Second of all, Anthony and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton weren’t exactly members of the subset of feminists that saw it mostly as a way to control male misbehavior and sexuality, who were arguing that women deserved the vote to improve their performance as mothers. As Schiff notes, Anthony was distinctly disapproving of baby-making as a past time, at least in some regards.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pregnancies were Anthony’s despair: how was it possible, she wailed, “that for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans�? She was equally indulgent toward Antoinette Brown Blackwell, one of the movement’s most gifted orators: “Now, Nette, not another baby, is my peremptory command.� Over and over she needled Stanton, galled that the suffragette dream team had “all given yourselves over to baby making and left poor brainless me to do battle alone.� Stanton was the mother of six — one of whom weighed more than 12 pounds at delivery — when she received those cheering words.

Anthony was a spinster, of course. But her own personal annoyance at her friends’ child-bearing ways aside, there’s no reason to think that anti-abortion in those days is the same thing as it is now. As Schiff points out, abortion was dangerous and dirty back then and contraception scarce, so as it was used, it tended to be under male control for male ends—women suffered from painful, often fatal abortions at the behest of men who couldn’t keep it in their pants, even if it meant misery and possible death for the women they were fucking. From a 19th century feminist point of view, which Anthony hints at above, it seemed like the solution was men to learn to control themselves better. Now that we have safe abortion, effective contraception, and women’s right to say no is respected a lot more. In Anthony’s time, the reason to believe that women who got abortions were often acting against their own wishes was that it was dangerous and women often didn’t have the power to really rebel. Now women do have that power and it’s not dangerous and FFL still thinks women can’t be acting of their own moral agency, because they think women are mental children. Anthony certainly didn’t think that. Oppressed and stupid are just different things.

But the best part of this op-ed is that Schiff blows away the FFL assertion that they have definitive proof that Anthony was anti-choice because of some quotes of hers they wield a lot.

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And why does Feminists for Life think rape victims need punishing anway?

As I noted last week, I signed up for Feminists for Life’s “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” weekly email. Unfortunately, they didn’t give me an opportunity to ask the question I wanted, which is, “If you’re pro-woman but anti-abortion, what efforts are you taking to help eliminate the number one cause of abortion, which is unplanned pregnancy?”* Their first email had no information about what I really wanted to know, but I figured that maybe their second one would.

The email doesn’t mention sex education or contraception up front, but the question does open up room for regular feminists and these mysterious “pro-life feminists” to collaborate on a truly pro-woman goal.

What about rape? What if it was your daughter who was raped?

In the past, this might be a more tense question, but in the present, there’s actually a stop-gap measure to help rape victims not get pregnant in the first place, which is to give them emergency contraception. Surely a “feminist” group will mention their efforts to get these contraceptive pills into the mouths of every rape victim, thereby reducing the number of rape-caused pregnancies and thereby abortions. Right?

Well, no. This “feminist” organization is unconcerned with empowering rape victims to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

Out of our desire to save someone from suffering, it is normal to wish we could erase a painful memory such as rape. Unfortunately, the hard truth is that as much as we want to, we can’t.

Abortion doesn’t erase a memory. Think about it. Could anything ever erase your memory of September 11, 2001?

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I signed up for the Feminists for Life mailer “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions” just yesterday and I already have my first answer in my email! However, it’s not to the question I asked, which is whether or not “Feminists” for Life wants to lower the abortion rate through the effective mean of helping women not get pregnant when they don’t want to be in the first place. I wanted to offer up my advice on how not to get pregnant, which is something I know a lot about, since I’ve never been pregnant. It’s really a two step process: 1) use contraception 2) correctly. However, they didn’t have a form for pro-choicers to submit questions and suggestions for this “dialogue”, so I was stuck offering my ideas to y’all, who already know about this magical formula to avoid pregnancy and therefore abortion.

Anyway, the first question is not about prevention, sadly.

Can you really be a feminist and pro-life?

Yes, let’s argue semantics instead of talk about the issue.

Yes. Feminists for Life of America continues the tradition of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early American feminists who opposed abortion. Our efforts are shaped by the core feminist values of nondiscrimination, nonviolence and justice for all. Established in 1972, Feminists for Life is a nonsectarian, nonpartisan, grassroots organization that seeks real solutions to the challenges women face.

Non-partisan in the sense that Ann Althouse is non-partisan, which is to say that they are littered with Republican funders and supporters, from Patricia Heaton to Jane Roberts, who is married to Chief Justice John Roberts, a super-conservative Bush appointee. Jane Roberts provides pro bono legal counsel to FFL.

We insist on a world in which women have access to all nonviolent options.

This is where I started getting excited, because surely “all nonviolent options” is a category that includes contraception and sex education so you can avoid getting pregnant in the first place. But, shockingly, they seem to have forgotten to include it in the list.

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