Nonviolent Choice: There Are, and Can Be, Better Ways Than Abortion

Nonviolent Choices for All Our Lives

2010-10-05T19:18:00.003-05:00

The Nonviolent Choice Directory is now a project of All Our Lives. We will keep doing the same things-just better.

Please Try Our Directory Again

2010-06-29T08:39:00.004-05:00

Our Directory at www.nonviolentchoice.info has been inaccessible during the past few days to some visitors. If that's you, please try again--looks like the problem is resolved.

Apologies--Downed Server

2010-06-26T17:12:00.002-05:00

Apologies if you have been trying to access our Directory and have not been able. The server appears to be down. We are so sorry. If you need anything, please ask here in the comments (you can do so anonymously if you like.)

Our Maternal Care Plea in UNFPA Blog

2010-03-16T18:59:00.004-05:00

The UNFPA blog Conversations for a Better World has published our It Affects Us All: Maternal Health Care.

Want to Affirm All Our Lives?

2010-03-05T18:10:00.002-06:00

All Our Lives is a group and a movement that Nonviolent Choice heartily endorses. Not hard to understand why:

"Nobody is defending women's right to make all non-violent choices about their sexual and reproductive lives without advocating for abortion as well. All Our Lives will change that. Our mission is to model a woman-centric, non-violent and inclusive approach to issues of health, sexuality, and reproduction."

Please take part. A good place to start: the All Our Lives Facebook Group .

Help Christine Taylor

2010-02-25T14:13:00.003-06:00

Christine Taylor is a Iowa woman with two already-born children and one still unborn. Although the charges were dropped, she was accused of attempting feticide after she fell down the stairs. An example of how laws supposedly intended for fetal protection can backfire and criminalize women in difficult situations.

Taylor and her children are under a great deal of stress and have very limited support resources. She was recently a robbery victim. A local childbirth advocate and midwifery advocate is gathering donations to help the family.

Please help if you can!

Black Genocide?

2010-02-10T14:09:00.008-06:00

Antiabortion billboards in Atlanta are occasioning controversy. They declare: "Black children are an endangered species."

That gets my attention. I am white, and there is only so much I am qualified to say on the matter, I cannot and never will be able to speak as a Black person myself. At the same time, my family is interracial, my grandbaby is of African descent... And everywhere in our majority Black neighorhood, children are indeed endangered, in more ways that I can describe here. So I do have something to say, for whatever it's worth.

The people behind these billboards speak of Black women's significantly higher abortion rates as part of a deliberate, carefully targeted genocide, one that they sometimes link to contraception.

Loretta J. Ross of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective counters: “The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the ’20s and ’30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them...Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works.”

So, who's right here?

Loretta Ross points out something quite vital but so often lost on antiabortionists who makes these claims. Although there is a long shameful history of fertility control coerced upon Black women, there is a world of difference between that and personal and community-driven demands for voluntary family planning.

Coerced contraception is violence, yes, but the violence is in the forcing. Voluntary contraception prevents a prenatal life rather than stopping one--so what quarrel should prolifers have with it?

Prolifers are far better prepared to reduce the abortion rate if they recognize and honor these demands for voluntary birth control, instead of just denying them or dismissing them as outside impositions.

Dooming Black women to pregnancy every nine months regardless of what they would choose for themselves, given the chance--how is that not genocidal, how is that not reverting back to the systemic abuse of enslaved women as "breeders"? And how does that save their children's lives or help the children in any way?

Now, I do regard abortion as unjust lifetaking, and am concerned about the higher rates in the Black community. But not in the sense of blaming and scapegoating women who do their best to deal with often very difficult circumstances. In the sense of identifying and challenging the role of systemic racism here.

One cannot genuinely, practically challenge abortion as "genocidal" without also naming and challenging the social realities involved in the higher rate of Black abortion: institutionalized poverty, poor housing, lack of educational and job opportunities, lack of quality health care including family planning and prenatal services, family and community violence, the criminalization of young Black men...

All of these harsh realities, implicated in so many abortions, are the ongoing legacy in large part of a white-supremacist society that ran on slavery and then eugenics.

So there is this element of truth to the "genocide" charge...but please nobody invoke it to throw further burdens onto the shoulders of Black women--which cannot be good for Black children either, unborn or already born.

UNFPA, That Rampant Killer

2010-02-04T15:39:00.005-06:00

An anonymous commenter on this blog implicates this blog/website in "killing babies" because of our support for UNFPA.

So, any mention of baby killing in this new dispatch from Americans for UNFPA? No. Because there's none to mention.

--UNFPA Rushes to Save Haiti’s Mothers

It fills my heart with joy to see the American response to the crisis in Haiti. As the President of Americans for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, I know our generosity sends a message that Americans step-up for those in need no matter where they live around the world.

We understand that even in the face of crisis, women continue to give birth. Sadly, for women in Haiti, it means that many will give birth in cars and tents, on park benches and bare ground, and under blazing sun with little water. Those who are lucky will manage to get to overcrowded hospitals or makeshift maternity wards with intermittent electricity and minimal equipment and supplies.

One of UNFPA’s top priorities is protecting the lives of mothers and their newborns. UNFPA is supplying safe delivery and reproductive health kits to still-standing hospitals, field hospitals, and mobile clinics. The kits contain life-saving medicines, supplies, and equipment for sterile deliveries, Caesarean surgeries, and treatment of other obstetric complications. In coordination with partners UNFPA is working to get the kits to all health facilities that need them, so that doctors and nurses have the medicines and supplies needed to protect the lives of women and their newborns.

Watch NOW on PBS documenting UNFPA and other organizations on the ground in Haiti working to save the lives of mothers during childbirth.

UNFPA and partners have initiated mobile clinic activities in 250 spontaneous settlements. Additionally, 20,000 dignity kits have been delivered to the border area and are being transported to Port-au-Prince and other areas that have been impacted by the earthquake. The kits contain items such as sanitary napkins, diapers, anti-bacterial soap, and other hygiene and cleaning supplies that allow women to live with dignity.

Did you know? Taxpayers can count charitable contributions made for relief efforts in Haiti on either their 2009 or 2010 tax returns as long as they are made before March 1, 2010.

But, our work has just begun. If we stand together, we can rebuild Haiti to be stronger than it was before. I thank you for your support in saving the lives of Haiti’s mothers.

Sincerely,

Anika Rahman
President, Americans for UNFPA

PS. Change doesn’t happen over night. Please consider joining our monthly donor program and lending your sustained support to UNFPA’s life-saving work.--

Moving Beyond Words

2010-02-04T15:34:00.002-06:00

My vision for a broad prochoice/prolife movement to reduce abortion:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/commonground/2010/02/03/moving-beyond-words

Action Alert: Pregnant Women & Unborn Babies in Haiti

2010-01-14T10:46:00.004-06:00

Pregnant women and their babies are highly vulnerable to death and injury in disaster situations. Please give to Americans for UNFPA in its work to aid the pregnant women and babies of Haiti.

What Our Readers Probably Have to Say Already About This Man

2009-12-15T12:46:00.004-06:00

Randall Terry: Faux Life Leader

Please pass this on to every prolifer you know, especially those who appear to be still fooled by Terry.

What Prolife Means

2009-11-09T11:21:00.001-06:00

Pro Life Means Guaranteed Maternity Care for All

RHRealityCheck.org: My Posts in the Common Ground Section

2009-09-30T12:20:00.004-05:00

How to Stop the Abortion War Killings

Pro-Life, Pro-Contraception, & Pro-Tim Ryan

What the First Wave of Feminism Can Teach the First Wave of Commmon Ground

How to Begin?

2009-09-23T21:43:00.002-05:00

How to even begin to organize a mass movement of people who are prolife on abortion and pro reproductive justice?

Once again, in the US alone, 80% of self-identified prolifers on abortion support contraception. Once again, younger people identify increasingly as pro life & pro LGBT...Where is the network of advocacy & service organizations that represent us?

Why haven't we created them already?

Jim Pouillon Murder

2009-09-12T14:21:00.003-05:00

Jim Pouillon, a well known antiabortion protestor in the small town of Owosso, Michigan, was shot to death. A suspect is in custody for this shooting and for the shooting of another man in the town. While the motive in the second killing isn't clear or made public yet, apparently the suspect has cited his objection to Pouillon's protests.

Pouillon protested with large, graphic signs outside places where children & youth were--schools, a day care center, a church--that weren't even abortion clinics. As far as I am concerned, those methods of protest are highly objectionable. better to stand around without the gory pictures, offering substantive help with prevention & with help during pregnancy & beyond.

But no one should be shot in cold blood like he was.

I hope this doesn't turn into a prolife/prochoice spat over whose martyrs get the most media attention. It's horrible that *anybody* was murdered. And how did people bent on murder, for whatever motive, have access to guns?

Progressive Prolife Thinking?

2009-07-24T13:03:00.004-05:00

This article talks about how some Catholic & Evangelical abortion opponents want to keep legislation to help already pregnant women utterly separate from bills to promote contraceptive access...and then, it is not stated outright, they fail to support the latter:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/06/29/as-white-house-readies-abortion-plan-packaging-emerges-as-major-issue.html

Oh, I get it. They're separating out the Madonnas from the Whores!

The very same dividing up of womanhood that has caused many an abortion throughout history, on the part of women who have feared being hounded & ostracized & even outright lynched as Whores.

More on Tim Ryan's Expulsion from Democrats for Life

2009-07-23T17:29:00.001-05:00

Pro Life, Pro Contraception, Pro Tim Ryan

Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options

2009-07-20T18:46:00.004-05:00

The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.

The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.

You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.

Take a Stand for Pregnant Women & Their Children

2009-07-20T18:26:00.004-05:00

Pesticides *still* endanger pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies. Please read the personal testimonies and take action here, with the United Farmworkers union:

http://www.ufwaction.org/campaign/drift709/7isxgn4r73e3xej

When "Moral Purity" Is Valued Over Helping Women & Children

2009-07-16T13:33:00.005-05:00

Rep. Tim Ryan was just ousted from the advosory board of Democrats for Life. The reason? Because he dares to insist that contraception is necessary to reducing abortion.

Please send your messages of protest to info@democratsforlife.org

If this happens in an organization that bills itself as progressively prolife--what future is there for the prolife movement? It is so out of touch with the reproductive justice concerns that women live with every day.

Especially when eight in ten people in the US who identify as prolife also advocate women's access to contraception.

So why doesn't the prolife movement--even organizations that say they differ from the mold-- include or represent us and our plans for reducing abortion?

Early Feminists & Reducing Abortion Today

2009-07-12T17:37:00.003-05:00

A contribution to the new On Common Ground section of RHRealityCheck:

What the First Wave of Feminism Can Teach the First Wave of Common Ground

A Sort of Copycat Crime?

2009-06-02T18:23:00.009-05:00

Yesterday, just a day after abortion provider George Tiller was gunned down at church, Private William Long, a 23 year old military recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, was shot to death. Private Quinton Ezeagwula, age 18, was wounded.

May William Long rest in peace, and Ezeagwula recuperate.

A suspect was taken into custody and charged with the shootings: Abdulhakim Muhammad, a 23 year old African American man who converted to the violent distorting strain within Islam--that does not at all speak for Muslims who know that "Islam" means "peace." Muhammad pleaded not guilty and said he killed the soldiers to retaliate for the killings of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it a mere coincidence that this happened right after the killing of Tiller? Or did it give the perpetrator the boost and sense of endorsement he needed to actually commit a deed he had been heading towards for a while already?

Like Scott Roeder, who has been charged with Tiller's killing, Muhammad was already been on the radar of law enforcement. So, once again, how exactly did someone with a known violent, terrorist ideology, under the scrutiny of legal authorities, get his hands on a gun and bullets?

I too am heartsick over the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who have died so unnecessarily in these wars. I am heartsick over the young African American men from my neighborhood who join the military because they feel it's their only or their best choice...and maybe Muhammad is someone who hit the very same skids that afflict a lot of young Black men as they are confronted with the harsh societal realities that shut them out of meaningful opportunities and brand them as violent criminals...

But as A.J. Muste insisted: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." Attacking military recruiters is no answer to the problems of war and racism, and attacking abortion providers is no answer to abortion and women's dearth of choices, either.

An Open Letter to the Prolife Movement, from a Prolifer

2009-05-31T19:33:00.003-05:00

The fatal shooting today of Dr. George Tiller is just plain horrific and wrong.

Absolutely *no* human being deserves to be shot down in cold blood...let alone in a house of worship, which should be a place of safety, peace, and refuge for *all* God's children who seek it there...no matter what they do for a living and no matter how objectionable we may find their means of livelihood.

*No* human being should usurp that power of life and death over another.

There is *no* justification or extenuating circumstances for this murder of a fellow member of humankind.

May peace and healing come to George Tiller's loved ones.

Today, and every day, each and every individual and group that identifies with the word "prolife" needs to ask, from a stance of complete humility and openness rather than hard headed and hearted defensive arrogance, questions such as this.

--Have I/we ever said or done anything that demonizes anyone who disagrees with me/us on the issue of abortion?

--Am I/are we willing to humbly learn from prochoicers what they deem to be demonizing words and deeds against them--quite independently of the question of which side is "right" or "wrong" about abortion?

--Have I/we ever failed to challenge anyone who agitates for the killing of abortion providers?

--Have I/we taken a strong, outapoken, unapologetic, unceasing stance against the killing of abortion providers, instead of just saying and hiding behind "well, real prolifers don't do that, and we're real prolifers"?

--Have I/we ever said or done anything that even sounds like it gives justification to the homicide of abortion providers, like "well, so few of them have been killed compared to the number of babies they've killed"--as if their relative fewness somehow makes their forcibly cut-short lives and their unjust deaths somehow unimportant?

--Have I/we ever taken positive steps to alleviate the causes and sources of violence against abortion providers?

--Have I/we ever reached out to prochoicers and tried to work cooperatively and humbly with them on preventing further violence against abortion providers?

Coming up with ethically robust answers to these questions is literally a matter of life and death.

Absolutely Horrified

2009-05-31T14:03:00.005-05:00

(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )

I just heard that George Tiller, the Kansas physician known for providing late-term abortions, was shot to death today.

As much I disagree with the work of abortion providers, such news is absolutely horrifying. Another life squandered by gun violence--and in the same of "prolife," of all things!!

Whoever committed this crime-it makes no sense to call yourself "prolife" and then gun down another human being in cold blood. Any more than it would make sense to oppose the war by opening fire on a recruiting center or military base.

My condolences to all who knew Dr. Tiller, and I will continue to pray for the safety of all clinic workers, to work for gun control, to speak up when I hear antiabortionists demonizing and dehumanizing their "enemies," who belong to the same humankind no matter what deep disagrements exist.

Gun Control Is a Reproductive Justice Issue: Some Thoughts for Mother's Day

2009-05-09T14:09:00.007-05:00

(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )

It happened again last week in my neighborhood, just a few blocks from where my family lives. I didn't hear the shots or the screams this time, but other times, I have. This past week, it was in broad daylight. The toll was one dead, one wounded--both young Black men.

And not a word about their fates in the big media, though certainly there was among the distressed neighbors. Including the children who grow up here knowing every day what children shouldn't have to think about too much: that their lives could be cut short on purpose by someone else in an irrevocable instant. A sweet-faced young man my daughter grew up with died from a gunshot to the back of his head. He left a baby girl behind. As much as for him, we wept to see his overwhelmed parents, family, and friends at the funeral.

I could take you on a sad pilgrimage around my neighborhood and show you all the telephone poles, corners, stretches of sidewalk, and weedy vacant lots where fellow human beings, mostly young Black men, saw the last of this Earth because of gun violence. There is nothing left in these places to mark their premature and abrupt departures except for the sorrowful and outraged hearts of those who pass by and remember what happened there and there and there.

Every year in the United States, gun violence kills 30,000 human beings and injures another 70,000. Gun rights advocates like to say, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." So why is it that I've never met anyone in my neighborhood who agrees with this statement? So many of these killings and woundings happen regularly in neighborhoods like mine, to low-income people of color, often Black and Brown young men.

In other words, it's not the same world most gun rights advocates inhabit. They tend to be majority-white and far more prosperous and able to pay for lobbyists. I am speaking of those who manufacture and profit from the gun trade, and the hunters who (in this country anyway) kill animals primarily for sport and not substinence.

In casting the gun issue as a matter of individual rights and responsibilities, the gun lobby only fuels the criminalization and scapegoating of impoverished people of color, especially young men. Framing the issue this way has an unmistakable implication: better-off white people must know how to handle their guns responsibly, and low-income people of color must not--why else would there be so many more gun crimes and deaths in *those* neighborhoods? *Those* people got what was coming to them, didn't they?

This framing of the gun issue prevents Americans from taking up the collective responsibilities we have too long failed: our collective responsibilities to structurally alleviate poverty, classism, and racism.

These include our collective responsibilities to challenge the patterns of underregulated or unregulated marketing and distribution which have allowed the gun industry to systematically insinuate its way into inner-city neighborhoods. Geoffrey Canada, a noted child welfare activist from the Black community, has spoken up about the gun industry's conscious strategies for moving into the inner-city once it had saturated and achieved the maximum profit it could from the "sportsmen's" market.

In the inner city, it's human beings who get hunted with guns now, and in most cases legal guns. 88% of guns used in crimes were bought quite legally from the rampantly unregulated sectors of the gun market. And US-made guns flood the international trafficking in small arms, which is responsibile for the high rate of gun violence in other beset places populated by poor human beings of color, like the favelas of Brazil.

Every single human being killed or hurt by gun violence made it onto this Earth in the first place because a woman carried him/her for nine months, birthed him/her, and in most cases raised him/her. And many victims of gun violence are, or were, parents themselves.

The right to raise our children in a safe, healthy environment is a core demand of reproductive justice. Not surprisingly, this demand arises from the very communities of color most devastated by gun violence. As well as an obvious pro every life concern, gun control is a reproductive justice issue.

Guns rights advocates are also the children of mothers, and many are parents themselves. Aside from the gun makers and those who hunt animals for sport, some honestly believe that the unregulated right of gun ownership is essential to protect themselves and their families.

What if they could see how much the lack of gun control undermines the ability of people in neighborhoods like mine to protect ourselves and our children? What if they could glimpse what we already have learned too often, the hard way: that guns constitute the falsest of hopes for personal security? That widescale disarmament is ultimately the best way to keep every mother's son or daughter, every parent, every human being safe and healthy as can be?

Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine's Hundredth Anniversary Bash

2009-05-04T04:39:00.019-05:00

(crossposted at Marysia's RHReality Check Diary)

And we weren't gate crashers, either. We were there as part of the festivities, sometimes recognized, sometimes not, sometimes welcomed, sometimes not.

For starters, take two of the speakers on the official program, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and political scientist Stephen Zunes. Most of the event wasn't about abortion, and these two activists were both present to speak on issues other than abortion (yes, progressive prolifers *really do* care about a whole slew of social justice issues). But their respective stances on that particular subject are a matter of public knowledge.

Anyone with Internet access can look up Marcy Kaptur's legislative record. Including her good record on labor, LGBT rights, family planning, and maternal/child health and welfare, among other recognizable-to-all progressive concerns.

Stephen supports the mission of Consistent Life, an international network of over 200 pro-every life organizations (including Nonviolent Choice). With peace psychologist Rachel MacNair, he co-edited the recent anthology Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War

Rachel and I are friends who go way, way back and have long histories of our own with Consistent Life. We team-staffed a literature table for CL in the exhibit hall at the Progressive Magazine celebration. Our table featured a large, eye-catching banner: "Prolifers for Peace, Peaceworkers for Life."

And who was the very first person to approach us, when we were still setting the table up? A young man who told us he was prolife, but did not feel free to disclose this opinion in progressive circles. Throughout the day, we met a number of pro-every life women and men who also gladly outed themselves to us.

And quite a few of the people who stopped by were prochoicers who said lovely, hospitable things like, "I may not agree with you about everything, but I'm glad you're here" and "I like your kind of prolife." We had good, respectful dialogues about relieving the root causes of abortion as well as better understanding our areas of disagreement. Including not one but two long conversations with an abortion clinic escort.

Rachel and I enjoyed the overall positive climate of these exchanges. In our long pasts with this sort of thing, we have both routinely experienced some rather difficult difficulties at literature tables. Yes, not everyone of the prochoice persuasion would do this, to be sure...But numerous prochoicers have quite rudely and precipitously mistaken us for some pretty horrid things that just a little polite conversation would quickly reveal us to be decidedly not.

No doubt prochoicers who staff literature tables are also quite familiar with this sort of abruptly unloosed torrent of verbiage that leaves not one unflooded space for response or engagement or self-defense...and it's not much fun, is it?

Although, especially later, it may afford some consolations of comedy. Rachel and I still laugh about the woman who long ago ran up and sternly ordered her, "Stop taking orders from the Pope!" When in fact Rachel is a dedicated Quaker, and the Society of Friends does not even have ministers, for Christ's sake! because that mess is just too durn hierarchical and authoritarian.

We didn't know quite what to expect at the Progressive Magazine event. But not a single person came up to our table and issued one of those dreaded adhominem rants, or scolded us along the lines of "What the hell are *YOU PEOPLE* doing here? Get the f*** out!" Which has also happened, far more than once. That is, when we haven't been excluded before we even had a chance to get in the door...

That's progress among progressives, for real.

Now, a few folks did raise eyebrows at our banner or shake their heads and walk briskly away. And once, when I was by myself at the table, I did distinctly see and hear a pair of conferencegoers stop dead in their tracks, proclaim "Yikes!" and turn aboutface in their tracks...

As if there were not a quite involved and invested sentient being (me!) taking all this in just inches away. And a sentient being at the ready to make eye contact and smile (sincerely, not fakily) at them in passing, at the very least, and if they allowed, to ask them, quite seriously, what specifically was behind that "Yikes!"

I did want to know, I did want to listen, but if people don't give you an opening...But any of these responses sure beat the bad old unreality-based ad hominem rant.

However, something quite troubling did happen to Rachel, after I had taken my leave of the conference and its nonproletarian-priced celebrity fundraising events on my customary posh, high-roller mode of transit, the Greyhound bus.

Rachel attended a bigwig panel discussion on the future of the progressive movement. During the question/comment period, she pointed out the existence of progressive prolifers. She recommended that the progressive movement as a whole work with us to reach people who otherwise might not give progressive values and politics any serious hearing.

Now, Rachel says she wasn't going on any longer, and probably was going on shorter, than others who lined up behind the questioners' mikes. I did attend previous panel discussions, and there sure were a lot of talkative folks with strong opinions who leapt up behind those mikes the instant they were switched on.

But the bigwigs on the panel grumbled that they could see where Rachel was going with this (they could? how did they know before she went there?) There amidst the advocates of free speeach, she was summarily cut off. "Free speech for me but not for thee..."

Then the panel bigwigs unleashed a number of statements Rachel had no chance to publicly respond to. One panel member, for example, criticized the Pope's statements about condoms in Africa--as if "prolife" meant you automatically bowed in obedience to those words, of course.

And no one openly challenged the censorship dynamic here. Indeed, there was apparently a lot of applause for it.

Rachel tells me what else she would have said if her mike had not been cut off:

"I would have responded by re-iterating and bringing [the panelists] back to the point I was actually making about outreach, rather than responding to non-sequiturs. There were several bizarre points made that I could have taken issue with, had I had all afternoon, but I would have kept on track because the session was about the future of the progressive movement and I was keeping on track even if they weren't."

(Now me, I would've explained how those "bizarre points" were nonsequiturs, *then* returned to the matter of outreach. But that's me.)

On the other hand, some women in the audience approached Rachel afterwards and shared their own reproductive challenges. They quickly grasped that hers was not prolife-as-expected, and they all ended up hugging each other.

But why were complex, nuanced, empathetic, very human, small-scale interactions like these--the kinds of exchanges we had both experienced elsewhere in the conference--not reflected in the overt, bigwig-marshalled, publicly unchallenged group dynamics that cut off Rachel's mike?

Like Rachel would tell you if she had half a chance--that question matters to the future of the progressive movement, to the hundred more years we wish the dear old Progressive Magazine.

Another Reason to Go Veg

2009-04-27T13:59:00.006-05:00

Daily Grist reports that the current epidemic/prospective pandemic of swine flu could be the direct result of industrial meat production. The US company Smithfield runs giant hog farms in Mexico, including some in the area where the infections in humans apparently began.

This isn't surprising. The pigs are crammed together in such a way that rampant diseases are pretty much inevitable. Same way that the global trafficking in poultry animals is implicated in outbreaks of avian flu.

One more reason, of many, to go veg: to refuse complicity in creating misery and death for so many sentient beings, human and other-than-human.

If you are thinking about going veg and aren't sure where and how to get started, please visit the Vegetarian Resource Group and GoVeg.com.

Please Take the 50 Million Missing Campaign's Gender Survey

2009-04-23T17:19:00.003-05:00

You may remember our interview on Female Genocide in India with Rita Banerji of the 50 Million Missing Campaign.

Rita just asked me to pass on this message.

Our gender survey for the 50 Million Missing campaign will close in another month or so and we need lots more respondents before then. So could I please ask you for help to circulate this link? Just forward it with a note to other people in your
email list.

We are telling people:
1. Not to give their names (it's anonymous).
2. Don't think too much. Just answer.
3. Takes less than 4 minutes.
4. Don't forget to click 'submit' at the end.

Here's the link:

http://www.my3q.com/home2/252/the50millionmissing/survey.phtml

Please circulate. Put on Facebook too.

Thanks much

Rita
Hope our readers will take the survey. By the way, congratulations to Rita for the positive reviews of her now globally distributed book Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies.

Reducing Overconsumption on Earth Day and Every Day

2009-04-22T11:48:00.003-05:00

(crossposted at Marysia's RHRealityCheck Diary)

I am glad to see this article on RHReality Check, pointing out the many points of connection between environmental and reproductive justice:

A Cleaner, Greener Planet

And of course one article can't cover all the grounds of this enormous subject, so I'd like to raise some more relevant issues.

When it comes to reproductive and environmental responsibility, many people is the wealthier countries think of the responsibility to limit their own reproduction for the sake of the planet.

Now I'm not going to argue for one minute that the Earth has an endless carrying capacity, or that people shouldn't voluntarily choose to limit their conceptions. But I do stand in solidarity with women from the Two Thirds World who finally were able to change the terms of the debate at the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo.

Two Thirds World activists have shown that it is not just the total number of people that threatens the environment, but the patterns of grotesque overconsumption in the wealthier countries. They have argued that the most important thing is to alleviate child and maternal mortality and ensure educational and work opportunities for women as well as access to voluntary contraception--and population size will take care of itself.

One key way for people in the wealthier countries to reduce their overconsumption is to forego (or at least minimize) their use of animal products. Many are beginning to ask questions about the use of such products in the manufacture of contraceptive and safer sex items, and to demand--and even get--contraceptives and safer sex items that are free of animal products, or at least products from animal carcasses. The Glyde Corporation, with its line of vegan-friendly items, is a leader in this regard. Please see the left side of this blog and also the Nonviolent Choice Directory Mall for (nonprescription) vegetarian and vegan birth control and safer sex items.

But the largest, single most decisive step people can take is to become vegan or vegetarian, for their own health, the health of other human beings, and of course for the sake of our fellow sentient beings who get killed for meat.

In the US especially, enormous quantities of energy and land are hijacked and blasted with endocrine-disrupting pesticides to feed meat animals crammed into factory farms. Which in turn create environmentally devastating pollution, as shown on the recent PBS "Frontline" special by reporter Hedrick Smith, "Poisoned Waters."

Growing at least part of one's own food organically and very locally is another option, even if one has very little available land But the average front lawn in the US can be through rather easy-to-learn, low-tech methods farmed to grow enough produce for a family of four for one year. And urban apartment dwellers often can join or start community gardens--that's how my own family has dealt with the problems of no yard.

To learn about these options, please visit:

Go Veg (includes Veg Starter Kit)

Grow Biointensive

as well as our Directory sections on Eco-Friendly Living and Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating

The net result can only be better for everyone's lives and health, including our reproductive health.

"Ecofeminismo pró-vida"--Prolife Ecofeminism Interview--Now in Brazilian Portuguese

2009-04-18T13:01:00.005-05:00

Thanks to Caio Capelari for translating my National Catholic Reporter interview into Brazilian Portuguese. I didn't even have to ask him! I would imagine that the prolife ecofeminist ethic is one that appeals to many in Brazil.

For those of you who want to read the original interview in English, please disregard previous links to it, as the NCR Online site has reorganized. The interview is now at:

http://ncronline.org/news/ecology/pro-life-eco-feminists-work-consist-ethic-life

Unfortunately, when the site was reorganized, a lot of articles, including this one, apparently lost the associated comments, including my comments in response to questions about legality/illegality and abortion.

Send a Safe Birthing Kit for $8

2009-04-18T12:08:00.002-05:00

(crossposted at Marysia's RHReality Check diary)

If you have access to the Internet, chances are that even with the
global economic downturn, you are still, wherever you may live, prosperous compared to the average person and family in the Two-Thirds World.

Are you still able to spare $8? UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, will send on your behalf a birthing kit to help protect and save the lives of one mother and one baby in a materially poor country.

(Note: UMCOR's relief work is something that I suspect people of all faiths and none could support--not all Christians use relief work as a pretense for prostelytizing by a long shot--but please check this out for yourself.)

Maternal and child mortality are interconnected global scourges. They are directly caused by the inhumane failure to make widely available even low-tech, inexpensive solutions like birthing kits or oral rehydration therapy to those who most desperately need them.

As UNFPA insists,"No Woman Should Die Giving Birth." Please visit this UNFPA site if you want to learn more about this unnecessary, preventable global injustice--and please be the solution for one mother and one baby through UMCOR.

Large institutional changes in health care are necessary to solve the problem on
a massive scale, but individuals and families in the present cry out for direct and immediate help, too.

Surely this is an area where prolife and prochoice can and should cooperate.

How to Afford Family Planning Despite the Economic Hard Times (US-Oriented)

2009-03-21T18:19:00.007-05:00

A report by Kathy Lohr of National Public Radio discusses the problems that the economic downturn poses for access to family planning--and suggests that many people are considering abortion who might not have before.

So Nonviolent Choice would like to highlight some resources that can help people suffering from these hard times to still access good birth control and prevent undesired pregnancies and abortions. (This is limited to people in the US, unfortunately.)

--Educate yourself fully for free online about the different methods and the pros and cons (including the financial pros and cons) of each one with the resources in the Pregnancy Prevention section of our Directory.

--Might you be eligible for the Medicaid health insurance program for low-income people? In many states, family planning is a free benefit under Medicaid. Start by visiting the website of your state's Medicaid office.

--Title X is a national family planning program that serves mostly low-income and many uninsured Americans with affordable services. Find the Title X clinic nearest you.

--See if your state health department has any free or low-cost family planning services of its own.

--Whether or not you personally have trouble affording your birth control, take action to ensure that everyone in the US who wants it can get it. Please regularly visit the 2-Minute Activist at Cristina Page's Birth Control Watch to see all that you can do.

Prolife Progressives Affirm All Our Lives

2009-03-06T08:41:00.006-06:00

Jen Roth of Turn the Clock Forward has just published A Primer on Prolife Progressivism in the progressive online journal Shared Sacrifice.

Great work, Jen!

At the end of Jen's article is an invitation to join a new initiative for prolife progressives, All Our Lives, that is influenced by both the consistent life ethic (secular & interfaith version) and the reproductive justice movement. If this is what you're looking for, as many readers of Nonviolent Choice are--please join in!

Criminalize Abortion?

2009-02-19T14:07:00.005-06:00

Harry 834, a frequent prochoice poster on RHReality Check, is asking participants in Nonviolent Choice about the question of criminalizing abortion.

He came here after a discussion on RHReality Check in response to an article by Amanda Marcotte. His profile on RH Reality Check is here.

I took part in this discussion and was quite frustrated by the flurry of ad hominem arguments. They did not come from Harry, and in fact I have had respectful discussions with him before this, too.

I told him my thoughts, and you are welcome to offer yours.

Red Envelopes for Life Don't Tell the Whole Story

2009-02-19T13:38:00.005-06:00

The Red Envelopes for Life Project asks people to send empty red envelopes to the WHite House with the folliwing written on the outside:

"Dear President Obama:
This envelope represents one child who died in abortion. It is empty because that life was unable to offer anything to the world. Responsibility begins with conception."

Yes, every abortion takes away an irreplaceable child. I'm not disputing that part of it.

But I cannot help but wonder *whose* responsibility begins at conception?

Is all the responsibility going to be heaped upon the pregnant woman, before, during, and ever after birth, same patriarchal set up as usual?

Or is the child's father going to assume his share?

Will the extended family and friends assume *their* share?

Will the schools, workplaces, religious institutions, and other private/civil society institutions assume *their* share?

Most of all, will the larger society assume *its* monster's share of the responsibility? Will it make an all out public commitment to reducing abortion through comprehensive sex education, full access to all prevention options, universal health care, living wage, et al?

And anyway, even if we're just speaking of individual responsibility here--doesn't individual responsibility begin before conception?

Doesn't it also reside in becoming fully informed about sex and reproduction well before one is ever facing the prospect of sexual activity?

About the various prevention options and all their strengths and drawbacks?

About prenatal development?

And doesn't it reside with boys and men as with girls and women?

Don't boys and men have the responsibility to learn that women are fully human beings, not just objects for their gratification?

Don't males have the responsibility to be utterly conscious that their sperm might fuse with ova and result in children they must support before and after birth?

Don't males have the responsibility to do all they can to have mutually consenting, egalitarian, nonviolent relationships with women?

Doesn't the larger society at all levels have the responsibility to support men in unlearning power-over women and learning power-with?

The Red Envelopes only tell one part of the whole story.

LGBT Phobia Promotes Abortion: Another Story in This Vein

2009-02-17T10:33:00.004-06:00

The Catholic University of America banned the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians from cosponsoring the recent Students for Life conference held on its campus.

The US head of the Rainbow Sash Movement, which promotes greater visibility of LGBT Catholics, sent off a media release protesting the exclusion. Students for Life and many members of the CUA student body disagreed strongly with the administration's decision. Which, by the way, was made with a lack of transparency--the same thing that shrouds many other discriminatory decisions.

As well as the violation here of the rights to free speech and freedom of association....If the voices of LGBT people are not heard in the prolife movement, the movement is all the poorer. How can it be about the right to life of LGBT people, too? And what can it learn to do to help LGBT people who are at risk for, or currently experiencing, crisis pregnancies--a very real problem?

We STILL Need Your Volunteer Help in Reducing Abortion!

2009-02-10T13:14:00.005-06:00

We are grateful for the responses we received to our plea for volunteers. We now have one volunteer, who prefers to be known only as Anonymous, who is regularly checking the links in the Post Abortion Care, Sexual/Reproductive Health Education, Crisis Pregnancy Support, Shelter, Eco Friendly Living, and Other Ways to Give Life sections of our Directory.

We are also talking with a couple of other people about two specific areas of expansion into non-US and/or non-English resources.

But the task remains huge. We *still* need more pro every life, pro nonviolent choice advocates to step forward. if you are serious about making a difference, here is a very real and concrete way you can do just that.

The following volunteer positions remain open.

---The Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info, is a free, online, global guide to positive resources for reducing abortion.

We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.

Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.

* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.

* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.

* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work. Still needed for the following sections:

--Free & Low Cost Internet & Computing Resources
--Our Affiliations
--Male Responsibility
--All Pregnancy Prevention Methods
--Mother & Child Health
--Parenting/Childrearing
--Adoption, Foster Care, & Guardianship
--Food & Nutrition
--Clothing
--Finances & Income
--Education
--Employment/Career
--Relationships

* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources. Still needed for ALL sections.

Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info ---

Contraceptive Funding & the Stimulus Package (US)

2009-01-28T09:08:00.008-06:00

US anti-contraception forces decried the inclusion of expanded Medicaid funding for family planning in President Barack Obama's stimulus package. Many references were made to the "culture of death" and throwing out money to encourage feckless, trashy, welfare-scamming fornicators.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not help when she pointed out the costs savings in births of poor children from the contraceptive proposal. Low-income Americans do not care to hear what expensive and unnecessary burdens we and our kids are on the public purse, thank you very much.

But the dropping of the proposal from the stimulus package is something that merited opposition. Because low-income Americans deserve the same access to family planning services and abortion-reducing measures as everyone else--*not* because the country should be targeting poor people to limit our unseemly breeding.

The stimulus package has been finalized, so too late to call for action upon it. Damn.

Update later in the day: No, it isn't too late. There's still hope to expand Medicaid family planning funding through other means. Please send out this action alert letter from the National (US) Council of Jewish Women's Plan A for Contraceptive Access initiative. Thank you!

A Nice Surprise on the Roe v. Wade Anniversary

2009-01-22T09:30:00.006-06:00

On the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, it is difficult to find commentary on abortion that does not simply reiterate the same old dogmas of "conservative and antiabortion" in a tag team grudge match against "progressive and prochoice."

Thank you to reporter Patrick O'Neill for something different, something that gives voice to pro every life, pro nonviolent choice advocacy. That doesn't happen every day, either.

Pro-life eco-feminists work for consistent ethic of life

Pro Female Condoms, Anti Mandatory HPV Vaccine for Immigrant Women

2009-01-14T10:01:00.007-06:00

Nonviolent Choice has signed on with Prevention Now, a coalition that wants to expand global access to female condoms in order to address the spread of HIV/AIDS as well as unintended pregnancies.

We are also an organizational endorser of a letter to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. The letter protests mandatory HPV vaccinations for immigrant women. These are not mandatory for citizens, so why single out immigrant women? The policy also plays into a long history of demeaning immigrant women as supposed bearers of sexually transmitted diseases into the country.

Want to sign on as an individual? By 5 PM Eastern Time (US) on January 30, 2009, please sign the petition
here.

Help Reduce Abortion: Volunteer Opportunities

2009-01-03T10:37:00.002-06:00

The Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info, is a free, online, global guide to positive resources for reducing abortion.

We are pro every life, pro women's rights, secular and interfaith.

Currently we seek volunteers for the following opportunities. Scheduling and number of hours per month are flexible. Volunteers will receive full credit for their work.

* Website Design: Help redesign the Directory so that it is more visually appealing and state-of-the-art, yet simple and uncluttered, as well as accessible to low bandwidth users in the Two Thirds World and to disabled visitors from anywhere.

* Publicist: Identify and make use of free and low-cost means (ethical only) to increase the Directory's visibility.

* Adopt A Topic I: Make the Directory as reliable as our visitors, especially people in crisis, need and deserve. Regularly check links in your chosen section(s) of the Directory to ensure that they still work.

* Adopt A Topic II: Make the Directory as comprehensive as our visitors need and deserve. Research possible new listings for your chosen Directory section or sections. We especially need more non-US, non-English language resources.

Please email editor at nonviolent choice dot info

LGBT Phobia Leads to Crisis Pregnancy and Abortion

2008-12-22T15:38:00.005-06:00

This post originally appeared on the blog of PLAGAL, the Pro Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. It appears here with the blessing of its author, Cecilia Brown, current PLAGAL president and a woman who has firsthand experience with the subject.

When I was young I knew I was different than everyone else. The only thing I ever heard when I was growing up was how “queers were *&%#*& perverts”. I spent my time trying to pretend I was someone else, straight.

As a result I ended up not with just one unintended pregnancy but two. One ending in abortion that almost ruined my life and the other the birth of my daughter. Because of this experience I have become active in the pro life movement and have gone on to become president of PLAGAL- The Pro life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians.

I share my story of how homophobia led me to pregnancy, abortion and how I came to the pro life movement to college campuses across the United States and parts of Canada. I have always known that pregnancy in the LGBT community was more wide spread because when I share my story many come forward to share theirs. For most of these individuals the only alternative to dealing with unplanned pregnancies that was ever mentioned was abortion. Abortion causes another bad can of worms to be opened up.

If sexuality were discussed in homes and in school for what it really was, suffering of so many would be eliminated. Finally I discover that someone else has been looking at the issue other than myself and has published their findings. To read the article that appeared in 365gay.com just click on the link below.

http://www.365gay.com/news/study-lesbian-teens-at-higher-pregnancy-risk/

Tell the National Organization for Women (US) What A Feminist Agenda Needs to Be

2008-12-13T12:32:00.003-06:00

The National Organization for Women is running an online survey asking what issues a feminist agenda should prioritize under the new Obama administration.

I gave the Reproductive Rights and Sexual Health item the very highest priority. Then, in the space provided for those want to add another issue to the agenda, I explained that I strongly advocated all other sexual and reproductive choice and health matters. However, I wished for NOW to turn its energies from defending a general right to abortion to reducing abortion.

Not too likely, but those of us who believe in nonviolent choice need to make our voices heard, and here is an opportunity.

From the Annals of What's Wrong With This Picture?

2008-12-02T11:01:00.004-06:00

This from Russia Today by way of ASTRA:

Novorossiysk, a city located in Southern Russia near the Black Sea, had the final say in the pro-choice vs. pro-life abortion debate. From the 24th to the 28th of November the city will conduct a "week without abortion". This means that doctors will not conduct termination operations, apart from "the most extreme cases".

At the same time, Novorossiysk's maternity welfare centre will hold open days during which information seminars on family planning will take place and "educational" films will be shown. Psychologists and gynaecologists will work with pregnant women in order to fully prepare them for motherhood. The city's universities will screen films, demonstrating the detrimental effects abortions may have.

A representative of the city's administration said that "doctors will do everything they can to stop women from doing the irreparable".

A hotline will operate in Novorossiysk over the course of the week, intended for pregnant women. Using it, they will be able to easily get in touch with leading gynaecological experts in Novorossiysk. The "week without abortions" was specifically timed to coincide with the Russian Day of Motherhood, which happens on the last Sunday of November every year.

The number of abortions in Russia is amongst the highest in the world. Nearly 70% of pregnancies are terminated. In 2004 the number of abortions in Russia surpassed the number of births by 100,000. According to the statistics published by the national centre of gynaecology and midwifery, around 10-15% of abortions in Russia have complications, leaving 7-8% of operated women sterile. In Western Europe there is, on average, 12 abortions per 1,000 women a year, UN statistics say. In Russia that number stands at 54.

2008 was declared to be the “Year of Family” by the Russian government, with the intention of improving the demographic situation in the country. The propaganda of abortions and their advertising has recently been banned in the Russian media. Other policies intended to boost childbirth in Russia have included welfare payments for childbirth, social advertisements and active improvements of the healthcare system.

Some creative programmes organised by local authorities included a day specifically dedicated to "child making". The Novorossiysk city administration insured that people were let off work early on that day in order to give them more time to boost the demographic situation in the country. A similar event took place in Ulyanovsk, a city in Southwestern Russia. Here, the local authorities went as far as timing the day to be exactly 9 months before The Day of Russia, with the intention of having an influx of new patriots as a result.

Recently, reports have been made that the government's policies have had little effect on increasing the country's population. According to some studies, the growing global financial crisis places people under stress, making them more reluctant to have children.

These very high abortion rates are an unfortunate legacy of Soviet times, when the state viewed ready access to abortion as a means of keeping women in the workforce without needing to make effective and usable means of contraception widely available, promoting male responsibility within families, or resort to other serious measures for preventing abortion. In the early days after the Revolution, it was hoped that family planning would replace abortion, but the state relied so much on abortion and valued women's and children's lives so little that this did not happen.

In present-day, post-Soviet Russia, there is some movement to prevent abortions. But the paradigm remains the same, doesn't it, as under Soviet rule: women and children are properties of the state, to be manipulated to the outcomes that the state prefers, whatever those outcomes may be. The concern is upping the birthrate, not protecting individual children's and women's rights to life and wellbeing.

Any efforts to oppose and reduce abortion are in the end ineffective and morally and politically bankrupt if they are not solidly grounded in these universal human rights. Something for abortion opponents in every nation to consider, if they have not done so already.

It shouldn't be about making women procreate. It should be about ensuring that women have as much say as possible in whether and when (if ever) to conceive, about revering their lives and the lives of any children they may conceive, whether or not according to plan, before, during, and ever after birth.

Revisiting Some Poetry Against the Iraq War; A Contradiction That Catches at Me

2008-11-23T16:00:00.010-06:00

Last night I was looking over a print anthology
of some of the over 21,000 poets who have contributed to Poets Against the War since 2003, as the Iraq War storm was gathering. (I'm one of those poets, though I'm not in the book.) Incredulous now, five years later, the utter obliviousness of the powers that be to all these prescient cries, and all the other eloquent voices of protest from around the world.

In her contribution to this book, the veteran feminist Marge Piercy excoriates the hypocrisy of an administration that proclaims a culture of life yet is so hellbent on destroying precious lives in Iraq:

Oh, we love fetuses now, we even/
dote on embryos the size of needle/
tips; but people, who needs them?/
Collateral damage. Babies, kids,/
goat and tabby cats, old women sewing/
old men praying, they'll become smoke/
and blow away like sandstorms/
of the precious desert covering treasure.

I share her outrage at this contradiction. Especially this week, when the ultraconservative antiabortionist Joe Scheidler claims that increasing social programs will not reduce abortion, and that prolifers who work with prochoicers on these abortion-reducing efforts are murderous betrayers of the unborn. I'd laugh if it were not for my weeping and "for shame!"ing.

But I wish I could ask Marge Piercy if the deepest and best and most shaking-up-for-the-good answer to this contradiction is to exclude embryos from the definition of "people"? What about (gulp!) defining them *in*?

Do unborn lives need to be treated as the "collateral damage" of the systematic violence against women that is the widespread denial of our right to make fully supported *nonviolent* sexual and reproductive choices--that makes disposable, "collateral damage" out of us, too?

Genocide of Women in India: An Interview With Rita Banerji of the 50 Million Missing Campaign

2008-11-21T12:54:00.009-06:00

Rita Banerji is a native of Calcutta (Kolkata), India. She earned her degrees from Mount Holyoke College and George Washington University and lived in the US for eleven years. She originally trained as an ecologist and conservation biologist. Under the auspices of the globally renowned ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, she worked with the Chipko movement, a mass, nonviolent mobilization against deforestation on the part of rural village women from the Himalayan foothills of Northern India.

Penguin Books India just published Rita's book Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies. Since 2006, she has been focusing her gifts as a freelance photographer and writer on her work as founder and director of the 50 Million Missing Campaign.

This is a global, online effort to challenge the widescale genocide of girls and women in India. The genocide encompasses the entire life cycle: female feticide and infanticide, daughter starvation, dowry murders, high maternal mortality rates, and maltreatment of widows. One very moving feature of the Campaign is its large photo gallery suggesting the beauty and worth of all the lives taken and injured by the genocide.

Rita stresses that the campaign’s position on abortion is for it “to remain legal in India and… it should remain an individual woman's choice independent of family and societal pressures.” However, there is tremendous common ground here, on an inescapable set of issues, for prochoicers and for those prolifers whose definition of “life” does embrace women. In fact, Nonviolent Choice recently added the 50 Million Missing Campaign’s petition to its list of action alerts. We appreciate her willingness to dialogue.

MARYSIA: I realize this probably varies by region, language, religion, cultural group, social status, and so forth in such a large country...but where, if anywhere, can Indian women who are pregnant with girls and harassed to abort them turn for short-term and/or long-term help in resisting and getting beyond the pressure? Who, if anyone, stands at the ready to help these mothers and their girl children--especially considering that so often the pressure comes from family members? What resources exist today?

RITA: There are some very sound laws in India that protect women who are being compelled to abort their female fetuses. The PC & PNDT (Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Test) Act which came into effect in 1996 requires for all clinics and hospitals in India to maintain records of all prenatal tests conducted on women (form F), details of the medical counseling offered to each woman (form D), as well as a form G where the woman has to give her consent and attest that she’s undergoing the test of her own will. More over, the law strictly stipulates that NO prediagnostic technique may be used to determine the sex of the fetus and nor should the gender be communicated to the parents verbally or otherwise.

Besides there are strong criminal laws for the protection of women. For all the following situations the penalty is 10 years imprisonment and a fine: if a woman is forced to undergo an abortion (section 313), if a woman dies when she’s forced to undergo abortion (section 314), or if a woman is subject to torture such that her unborn child dies (section 316) in which case it is treated as “culpable homicide.” Moreover, all these crimes are cognizable, i.e., the police can arrest without a warrant and [these crimes] are non-bailable.

There are bodies like the National Commission for Women in India’s capital, Delhi, as well as state level Commission for Women offices that have a system of filing complaints by women not just in the case of forced abortions but domestic violence or dowry related abuse. They are supposed to investigate the cases filed with them.

For the PC&PNDT enforcement there is District Appropriate Authority set up in each state that sweeping powers to investigate any individual, doctor, clinic or hospital involved in a possible violation of the law. They have the power to initiate an inquiry without a warrant, confiscate equipment and seal a clinic or hospital if they find evidence of violations.

However, having a law is one thing and but their implementation is another issue. The biggest problem, I think, is there is no political, administrative, or social will for the enforcement of these laws. There are many reasons for this.

1) Government offices in India generally tend to be bureaucratic and corrupt. Doctors and clinics can always “buy” their way out of trouble and get the cases against them dismissed.

2) There is also tremendous social apathy to these issues and there is no public demand for change. Indeed, if close to a million female fetuses are being aborted each year and about 25,000 young married women are murdered for dowry and thousands others are left maimed after vicious attacks on their lives, there is extensive social complicity in these crimes.

3) Women themselves are very hesitant to file complaints against their husbands and in-laws because of deep rooted cultural notions of family "honor." First of all, there is not much public sympathy for these women. But oddly enough, even when women are provided with extensive support and a chance to start a new life – they opt to return to their husbands and withdraw their case because to many marriage is the ultimate worth of their lives. And they can be married to only one man in their lifetime – that is what culture dictates. It is a mindset that women cannot be talked out of – because it is so pervasive, and so old in its existence in India's social milieu. But what it will take is a revolution of customs and traditions through a systemic form of education – and that in itself is a challenge because there is nothing India adheres to more ferociously (at the cost of bloodshed) than tradition!

MARYSIA: In addition to your campaign, what other kinds of resources exist for eradicating the problem of sex selection, for example, education campaigns on gender equality, or alternatives to the dowry system?

RITA: A lot of the effort is grassroots and local. And then every NGO has its own reading of the issues and how the issues should be dealt with.

At the national level there is only one project that comes to my mind and that one sponsored by UNFPA jointly with a Bombay based NGO (Population First) – called the Laadli Campaign. “Laadli” is a term of endearment for a girl child, and the campaign focuses on the falling gender ratio in India. They have a Laadli media award for each region every year for coverage given to concerned issues.

Though I think also because of the disparity in how this so called “gender ratio” problem is viewed and dealt with, it is difficult to try to form a consensus on solutions and hence as of now we don’t have a coordinated nationwide effort to deal with this issue.

MARYSIA: What resources still need to be created, whether they are about immediate service to beleagured pregnant women, or about another approach?

RITA: What we really need is shelters for women who have the courage to walk out of violent and unsafe domestic situations and need a temporary place to stay. Given the lack of resources, these women will have to be accessed legal aid, counseling, and help with finding a job and setting up a new life (which otherwise too is very difficult for a single woman in a male dominated society like India’s).

MARYSIA: There is such a great unmet need for these services. However, they do exist now in many countries and in many tongues where they did not before. They are growing. I can remember a time in the United States when no one knew what a domestic violence shelter was, because there wasn't yet such a place.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory lists many potentially helpful resources for women around the world, including women within India and in the worldwide diaspora, who need help resisting and escaping pressures to abort a girl child, or any other form of domestic violence. Please especially try here and (for women seeking alternatives to abortion) here.

I would especially recommend one of our listings, an international directory of domestic violence resources. It is organized by country, including India and the diaspora countries, as well as by language, including the widely spoken South Asian languages.

RITA: Women also have to be educated about the laws that entitle them to protection and we need a complete re-education on people’s social priorities. For centuries society in India has dictated to women that the ideal woman always protects the family’s honor even at a cost to herself. So many women put family loyalty over their own safety. Indeed, unlike the west where the courage of women to walk out of violent homes and marriages is lauded, in India there is tremendous social stigma across all classes of society. This is something that won’t change through conventional education, but only through social intercourse, by challenging old customs, and encouraging change. However, it will be a very long and difficult task – given how defensive Indian society is about traditions and old ways.

MARYSIA: In researching feminist work like yours against sex selection in India, I have found a deep suspicion of people who oppose abortion per se and profess concern about the problem. On the one hand, I can understand this. There are antiabortionists who are downright hostile to women's equality, then suddenly profess support for it when the issue becomes sex selective abortion, all the while dismissing the problems faced by pregnant women with girl fetuses as "trivial." Not very convincing!

On the other hand, this suspicion is frustrating for people whose opposition to abortion stems from respect for both female and fetal lives (we do exist!), and who therefore want to ally with activists like you and efforts like the 50 Million Missing Campaign. Not out of a cynical expediency, but a genuine concern for women's and children's rights that applies across a wide range of injustices. From your vantage point, how can people like us best try to form alliances, even as we disagree on abortion rights in general? What do we need to understand about advocates like you?

RITA: Perhaps your question more directly put is how can I fight for the life of women and girls and not for that of unborn fetuses?

MARYSIA: That’s part of it.

RITA: I am a biologist by training, and my perception of the world is in terms of the living. When my students studied sexual reproduction in plants, and dissected apples and tomatoes, what I always told them was that every fruit or vegetable they ate was life. That we consumed not just the embryos (the seeds) but also, what for plants would be the “wombs.” You might have heard of the Jain sect of religion in India. Their monks keep a cloth over the lower half of the face, because they believe that every time we breath in we kill countless micro-organisms in the air.

Our bodies house lots of living organisms. We take antibiotics on a regular basis. Bio [means] life. Antibiotics not only kill the harmful but the beneficial organisms living in our body too. Essentially, what I am saying is that we all end up killing life at some level whether we want to or not.

The pro-choice issue however does not advocate the killing of fetuses through abortion. Its primary concern is with giving the woman the right over her own body. The fetus is life, but it is incapable of independent existence. Till then it is a parasite in her body – like any other parasite that may be living in her body, and feeding off her body. Whether or not she will allow it to live there is her choice. So the choice view is that you can’t force her to abort, just as you can’t force her not to abort. However, from the point (usually the end of the 2nd trimester) where the fetus is capable of independent existence, I don’t think abortion is legal in any country.

MARYSIA: At the very least it is in the US, and China. Indeed in Chinese-occupied lands post viability abortions have been forced on women, especially Tibetans and Uyghurs, as part of the coercive one child policy. Other than that, I am not sure.

RITA: Our standpoint in the 50 Million Missing campaign is that most women in India are a form of reproductive machinery for the patriarchy. They are made to go through repeated pregnancies and abortions in the patriarchy’s hankering for sons! This is not only anti-choice. But according to the 1948 UN convention on genocide – the prevention of birth and continuity of a group is genocide.

That definition cannot apply to the question of abortion in general – because with the population explosion of the human race, nobody is attempting to stem the birth of humans in general. However, that definition does apply to women in India. What’s happening in India is a collusion between a corrupt leg[al system], the medical establishment and the social patriarchy at large to prevent the birth and continuity of girls in India.

MARYSIA: Yes, it is true that no human can survive without taking at the very least the lives of plants, some microbes and insects, too. Being a longtime vegetarian, and someone who is very careful about preventing the need for resort to antibiotics use, and about household and garden pest management, I am well aware of that!

But the question needs to be asked with every possible form of lifetaking humans engage in: Is this really necessary? Justifiable? Is this something that falls under the rubric of individual choice or jurisdiction? Is it something there is a collective responsibility to oppose and uproot?

When it comes to abortion, you and I obviously draw the parameters on this particular matter of lifetaking somewhat differently--even though I too have been educated as a biologist.

I do not see the fetus as a parasite; pregnancy is rather the most basic biological and social interconnection human beings have, and it is between two equally valuable lives and bodies.

Although I do get your point that you are not pro abortion per se but pro treating the decision as the pregnant woman's...Dependency is a dangerous criterion for deciding who lives and who dies (or at least whose life and death can be decided as a matter of someone else's personal choice).

After all, from an ecological perspective, all humans are dependent to some degree. And historically dependency has been socially constructed in various ways as a hallmark of being "less than" and a possibly dangerous, unjustifiable consumer of resources and therefore potentially disposable. Consider, for example, the notion of the wife as dependent/parasitic upon the husband, disabled persons are dependent/parasitic on the ablebodied, the colonized as dependent/parasitic on the colonizer...

From this vantage point, it is clear how very much discrimination against female fetuses is bound up with discrimination against already-born girls and women, and vice versa. Although unborn and already-born are so often pitted against each other in the abortion debate, an injury to one is an injury to both.

Do you think there is room for people with this sort of prolife perspective on abortion in the movement against sex selection, dowry murders, and other forms of violence against women?

RITA: A group of fetal cells growing inside a woman's body -- feeding off her body is essentially the same as a any other group of cells in her body.

Which is why we try not to argue it from the point of a woman's right to not choose to have a girl. We argue of it as a collective social attempt to prevent the birth of girls -- which is already defined as genocide -- an international crime.

MARYSIA: Approaching sex selection as part of a whole pattern of female genocide is something prolifers as well as prochoicers can do. Once again I urge our readers, whatever your views on abortion itself, to sign the 50 Million Missing Campaign’s petition. Thank you for this conversation, Rita.

Nonviolent Choice Shares Its Vision With Change.gov

2008-11-12T17:03:00.004-06:00

Turn the Clock Forward is inviting progressive prolifers to share their visions with Barack Obama and his administration through the change.gov website. Nonviolent Choice has taken up the invitation:

Dear President-Elect Obama,

I hope you will make good on your campaign promises and make a real, result-producing effort to bring prolifers and prochoicers together in an effort to alleviate the root causes of abortion.

In developing an action plan to reduce abortion, please call upon those of us who identify as pro *every* life, born and unborn, before, during, and ever after birth. We do exist. In fact, we have existed for centuries, often at the forefront of justicemaking movements of every kind. But US culture has all too often shut out what we have to say, even burying and suppressing our history.

The audacity of hope? I am audacious enough to hope that you and your administration will listen to everything we have to offer on the urgent matter of reducing abortion.

Sincerely,
Mary Krane Derr, Editor
Nonviolent Choice Directory, www.nonviolentchoice.info and nonviolentchoice.blogspot.com
Co-Editor of the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition (Feminism & Nonviolence Studies Association, 2005)

But Wait, There's More

2008-11-06T19:26:00.004-06:00

Now that the US elections are over (for the next couple years, anyway) here is another action alert, from the progressive Christian group Sojourners (by way of the coalition Consistent Life, which Nonviolent Choice belongs to).

Sojourners has a new online petition calling upon President-Elect Barack Obama to adopt an action plan based on respect for all lives. It includes "common ground policies which can dramatically reduce abortions in America, and help bring us together on this divisive issue."

The petition has some Christian and religious language, but the actions it calls for can surely be advocated by people of all faiths and none. So please use your own discretion in deciding whether to sign. And if you do not feel comfortable signing the statement, but agree with its action plan, then you can send your own letter to Obama's Senate Office, while he is still there, of course.

Our Current Action Alerts: Do Something Life-Affirming--Today!

2008-11-04T13:14:00.015-06:00

Just to tell you about or remind you of our current action alerts. There's something here for just about everyone...

Help Reduce Abortion by Volunteering for Nonviolent Choice!

10 Ways To Make a Real Difference for USD$10 or Less

Abolish Violence Against Women and the Reproductive Wrongs It Causes

Amnesty International: Return to Abortion Neutrality

Baby Bottle Makers: Stop Poisoning Unborn & Already-Born Kids!

Become a Blood, Other Tissue, or Organ Donor (includes info on umbilical cord blood donation, and a plea to people from all communities of color in the US)

Boost Your Odds of Contraceptive Success

Call for Good Maternity Care in the Czech Republic

Child Abuse: You Can Do Something

Choose Alternatives to the Military

College Campuses: Make Them Welcome Places for Pregnant & Parenting Students and Their Kids!

Congo Rape Situation: Donate to A Hospital & Day Care for Survivors & Their Children (thanks, Turn the Clock Forward).

Defend College Students' and Low-Income Women's Right to Nonviolent Choice!

Demand Diaper Benefits for the Poor (US) and/or Organize a Diaper Drive

Educate Others-or Maybe Yourself?- About LGBT Justice

End "This Shameful Neglect" With the White Ribbon Alliance

Endorse UNIFEM's "Say NO to Violence Against Women" Petition

Ensure Access to Voluntary Sterilization (US)

Establish an Endowed Scholarship for Pregnant & Parenting Students

Female Feticide in India: Take A Stand

Get Up, Stand Up, for All Our Rights: Endorse Pro Every Life, Pro Woman, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto" (coponsored with Turn the Clock Forward)

Health Care Hell USA: Demand Universal Health Care With "Sicko" Director Michael Moore and Cover Poor Pregnant Women & Children With the Children's Defense Fund

Help Distribute A Global Family Planning Handbook (USD $10 per copy!)

Help Save the Lives of the 25,000 Already-Born Kids Who Die from Preventable Causes Every Day

Join the National (US) Council of Jewish Women's Plan A for Contraceptive Access & Defend Poor Americans' Family Planning Funding

Paid Sick Days, Anyone? (US)

Petition From Parents of People With Down Syndrome

Practice Eco Friendly Living

Protest Harassment of LGBT Youth

Reduce Mercury Exposure Before & After Birth

Save Title IX, the US Law Safeguarding Women's Equality in Education, Including the Rights of Pregnant & Parenting Students

Save Unborn & Already-Born Lives Through UNFPA

Stand in Solidarity With the Tibetan People

Stand Up For HIV/AIDS-Affected Women & Children

Stop PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) Poisoning

Tokophobia: Dreadful, But Treatable

Violence Against Native American Women Is "Not Traditional"

Want to Volunteer for Nonviolent Choice?

2008-11-03T15:08:00.003-06:00

Nonviolent Choice needs volunteers to:

--Adopt a section or subsection of our Directory and check the hyperlinks once a month to make sure they still work. This is no unimportant task. Broken links keep our visitors from getting right to the information and assistance they seek, sometimes while they are in a personal crisis.

--Adopt a section or subsection of our Directory and search the Internet once a month for new or additional resources to nominate for it. We especially need volunteers who are familiar with countries other than the US and languages other than English.

Interested? Please email editor [at] nonviolentchoice [dot] info. Tell us what you would like to do and why. Thank you!

New Scholarship for Pregnant & Parenting Students

2008-10-31T16:58:00.005-05:00

The prolife student group at St. Louis University in Missouri is doing something truly deserving of the name prolife. It is establishing an endowed scholarship for pregnant and parenting students.

Now here is a fundraising goal that our readers are no doubt interested in helping the SLU students to achieve. So, why not contribute what you can?

And if your own current school or alma mater does not have help in abundance for its pregnant and parenting students, then it needs to. Right now. Why not raise the issue? Sadly enough, it could be that no one has. Yet.

Whatever its shortcomings in my personal opinion, Feminists for Life does offer an Evaluate Your Campus tool to find out just how friendly or unfriendly your school is to the pregnant and the parenting--and to identify the changes that need to be made.

Violence Against Women: A Frequent But Neglected Cause of Unintended Pregnancies

2008-10-24T15:19:00.003-05:00

Many thanks to Esta Soler at RHRealityCheck for calling attention to the often-neglected role of sexual coercion and contraceptive sabotage against women in causing unintended pregnancies. And that means often, accelerated battery during pregnancy, and/or abortion.

Soler discusses the Know More campaign of the Family Violence Prevention Fund. According to an announcement on the Fund's website, the Know More campaign is "designed to create a dialogue about the birth control sabotage and reproductive coercion that many teens and young women face, which can result in unintended pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, miscarriage, infertility, coerced abortion, and a range of other serious health issues."

And if you are in the US, please respond to the campaign's action alert to "Help Abused Women who are Pregnant & Help Prevent Unintended Pregnancies".

Both prolifers and prochoicers have so often shared the assumption that women are free and equal actors in intimate male/female relationships. This has resulted in such toxic judgments as "Why are *you* so upset about your abortion, it was *your choice*!" and "What a feckless, irresponsible slut, she got pregnant when she could have just used birth control." And this assumption has really thwarted effective solutions to women's reproductive health and justice problems--including unintended pregnancy and abortion.

Prolife feminists have been speaking for centuries about violence against women as a major cause of unintended pregnancies and abortions..

For centuries, who has listened to us?

Better late than never for a more widespread public recognition of what is really going on with so many women who face horrific pregnancy dilemmas. We are all that much closer (one can only hope) to a world where women and children, the born and the unborn, are both alive and safe and well.

Speak Out Against Violence to India's Female Babies

2008-10-22T19:26:00.007-05:00

The 50 Million Missing Campaign challenges the rampant sex-selective abortion of baby girls in India. It was founded by Rita Banerji, an ecologist protegee of the internationally renowned Vandana Shiva.

Please sign their petition calling upon the Indian government as well as international human rights and governmental bodies to take substantive action.

Some US prolifers speak of sex-selective abortions as "trivial." As appalling as the abortion of girl-children is, it will never be uprooted and abolished until everyone recognizes that the violence and discrimination faced by women who try to resist it is just as appalling.

Mitu Khurana, a physician from Delhi, publicly stated that she was illegally forced by her physician husband and inlaws into a prenatal sex determination test for the twins she was carrying. When the test revealed that the babies were girls, they pressured and harassed Khurana in an effort to make her abort them.

She courageously refused. As she told the Mumbai Mirror, "I chose to escape and am proud to say that I have given birth to two lovely daughters." The story as well as a beautiful photo of her with her two baby girls can be found here.

What is more, she went public and took legal action against her harassers. Fortunately her own parents have welcomed her back home and are standing right behind her and the little girls. If only more Indian women in this situation could have support in choosing life for their girl children! And even with her own parents' help, Mitu Khurana has been subjected to suffering no one should ever have to face. And how to tell two little girls that apparently some of their own family wanted them dead because they weren't boys?

Response from C-FAM President Austin Ruse

2008-10-17T19:30:00.003-05:00

Austin Ruse is president of C-FAM, the ultraconservative Catholic group sponsoring the petition I just discussed, the one that links protection for unborn children to the abortion-causing and otherwise discriminatory imposition of a certain single model of family life.

His response, and my response to that, can be found here.

There are a lot of things Ruse does not address.

A lot of "traditional family values" advocates probably don't want to face this: their ideal world leaves a lot of women with no choice but abortion, and otherwise promote and perpetuate other forms of violence and discrimination, such as LGBT phobia in all its manifestations.

I doubt these family-touting folks will ever persuade others to oppose abortion on any grand scale unless and until they sort through and get past this big implosion of a contradiction. Indeed, some people are troubled by abortion, but because prolife is linked so much to "family values," their questionings of abortion stop or even reverse their tracks.

For Once, A Single-Issue Approach Would Be Better!

2008-10-15T14:13:00.008-05:00

I never thought I'd advocate a single-issue approach to abortion, but I have found one situation where I wish this were the case.

December 10 of this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And to mark the occasion, the conservative Catholic group C-FAM is sponsoring a petition to call for inclusion of unborn humans in the Declaration.

Ah, but that's not all. In order to declare your support for this proposed revison to the Declaration, you have to declare your undying support for some other stuff, too...after all, it all must automatically go together, no?

Namely, the unborn child not only has the right to life, but "the right to be conceived, born and educated within the family, based on marriage between a woman and a man, the family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society."

So much for us prolifers who believe prolife includes universal public commitment to the equal education of all children, and respect and ample social support for diverse, egalitarian family forms, including families headed by single parents, adoptive and foster parents, and LGBT persons, including of course same-sex couples.

Apparently we are not eligible to support the the unborn child's right to human life. Voila! We are disaqualified! Who needs us God-hating fornicators and sodomites, hunh? We can't be for real anyway, can we?

I bet C-FAM could get a lot more signatures if it did not in this petition put such a "family values" qualification on support for the unborn child's human right of life. If they want to add their beliefs about family life to the Declaration, why not call for that in a *separate* petition?

There are prolifers like me who have thoughtful, compassionate, and even (gasp!) ethical, religious and spiritual motives for not connecting such a view of "family values" to protection of the unborn child.

For one, if an unborn child's right to life is respected by protecting him or her from abortion, but he or she is not conceived, born, and/or educated within the heterosexual nuclear family... then he or she by definition has a wronged and compromised life. He or she has a fundamentally spoiled identity...and how is this so different, from example, from the supposedly no-longer-in-use designation of nonmaritally conceived human beings as "illegitimate"?

When any human is regarded as having a spoiled identity, then he or she becomes *more* vulnerable to violence and discrimination, *not less.* Before birth, as well as after.

Are Jennifer Baumgardner's Discoveries About Abortion and Prolife Feminism New?

2008-10-10T13:16:00.011-05:00

Jennifer Baumgardner is a well-known US feminist who has published books on feminist organizing, "third wave" feminism, and bisexuality. She coproduced a documentary on prochoice women's abortion experiences and invented the "I Had an Abortion" T-shirt. She has just published Abortion and Life, a collection of women's narratives about their own abortions.

Although I have yet to read the book, I have read Mindy Van Deven's interview with her about it. The interview is entitled Can You Be A Feminist and Anti-Abortion?. The question is posed seriously, not rhetorically, and the answer, fortunately, is "a resounding yes" rather than the accustomed big fat NO.

Baumgardner shares some discoveries she has recently made about abortion from listening to women's experiences. She remains an abortion rights supporter, but some of her discoveries sound...well, rather familiar to my ears and the ears of a buncha people I know. And to our hearts.

Considering such stories "rightwing propaganda," she previously was "resistant to hearing that a woman had a bad experience with her doctor or that she was extremely sad or had regrets about her abortion." Now she feels that such stories are real, if (to her view) in the minority, and "to suppress them or not want to hear them is a position of weakness."

She now believes that the use of the term "fetus" as opposed to "child" is for many women who have had abortions "limiting and even alienating...I have met women who think of the child -- their word -- every year on the day it was due to be born...[W]omen write prayers to their unborn babies, asking them to be guardian angels."

While she formerly thought abortion was "removing inanimate tissue," after witnessing abortion procedures, she now considers fetuses to be "human life." And she is "not cold" to the taking of their lives through abortion. She calls upon "pro-abortion people" to assume the "moral responsibility" of not shiedling themsleves from the "thornier or grislier aspects of abortion."

She seriously acknowledges the existence of women who do recognizably feminist things like directing the "Vagina Monologues" or helping with Afghan girls' education, who have in some numbers asked her directly if they can identify as prolife on abortion and still be feminist. She has learned that they are not inquiring "whether bombing an abortion clinic can fall within the realm of feminism," but expressing and defending their serious concerns for the value of fetal life.

Although she includes some points such as supporting early and medical abortions (?), she identifies the components of activism she would name as truly prolife feminist. These includes creating social supports for women who wish to raise their children; supporting contraception and comprehensive sex education; "actively condemn[ing] violence" against abortion providers; and "truly[ing] understand adoption, and work[ing] to make sure the birth mother has a voice." She concludes that "finding more and better ways" to be a prolife feminist "would be, in a word, revolutionary."

Although these insights may be new to Baumgardner, and perhaps others in her prochoice feminist circles, prolife feminists have been thinking, expressing, and taking action on these very realizations for centuries, very often in response to women's own stories of abortion and other difficult reproductive problems.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory, including this blog, is all about such "revolutionary" activism. The book it grew out of, ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, documents the long, rich, culturally, religiously and otherwise diverse herstory of prolife feminists.

But I don't think "who got here first?" is the most important question, even if it needs to be pointed out and backed up with extensive documentation.

The most important question is this: "Now that we're on the same page about so many vital points, how can we cooperate together to reduce abortion and otherwise promote reproductive justice?"

That's the one that ultimately will make the most difference to real-life, flesh-and-blood women and children, the already born and the unborn.

About Those SMS Messages...

2008-10-10T10:53:00.008-05:00

Did you recently receive an SMS text message containing a link to the Nonviolent Choice Directory, from one of those anonymous texting services that blitz the entire cellphoned world? Was the sender of the bizarre prankterish content identified only as "GOD"?

The Nonviolent Choice Directory disclaims all prior knowledge of and all responsibility for these messages. For starters, we could never claim to speak in the voice of the Almighty, even as a joke.

However, may we highly suspect that She would disclaim responsibility, too? May we share the strong mental image of God that appears to us--She's probably rolling Her eyes and sighing, "Not *that* kid again, he needs to get over his boredom and get a life!"

Maternity Care in the Czech Republic

2008-10-09T11:22:00.003-05:00

The organization Normalni Porod, Normal Birth, is sponosoring a petition to improve the largely substandard maternity care in the Czech Republic, including the dishonoring of the midwife profession.

Anyone from any country can sign. All you need to be is concerned that Czech women and babies have the most life-affirming pregnancy birthing alternatives they can have, like women and babies everywhere.

The petition appears in both English and Czech versions. Please click here.

Eugenics: Alive and Still Kicking...the Same "Unfit" Folks in the Pelvis

2008-10-07T14:42:00.008-05:00

By way of Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz, blog of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health:

Contrary to his party's stated preference for "hands off" governance, a Republican state rep in Louisiana, John LaBruzzo, is calling for finanical incentives so that low-income people will get sterilized and the well-off and educated will have more kids. He may not be calling attention to it, but is there not a certain suspect ethnic/racial as well as class distribution between the two portions of this scheme? And I have to wonder: does Rep. LaBruzzo himself come from any immigrant ethnic or working-class background that he now regards with contempt? Some people do, alas, when they "make it" in America.

This isn't just the specter of eugenics--specter, as if it ever passed away with the Third Reich. It *is* eugenics, and a cardinal principle of it: "More children from the fit, fewer from the unfit." With practically the same definitions of who is and isn't reproductively fit, handed down from the same place: on high.

Now where have we heard all this before? I highly recommend the coverage of eugenics in ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, as well as in Edwin Black's War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

The Nonviolent Choice Directory stands for voluntary contraception and against sterilization abuse and other forced uses (or nonuses) of family planning. Please see our resources on All Pregnancy Prevention Methods, which includes a section titled Protest Coercion in Family Planning.

Towards Zero Preventable Child Deaths

2008-09-27T09:26:00.006-05:00

A report from the United States Fund for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, presents some very welcome news about already-born children's mortality. Since 1960, the global death rate of children under five has decreased by 60 percent.

In an email announcing the report, US Fund for UNICEF head Caryl Stern says this is reason to redouble systematic lifesaving efforts for the 25,000 children who are still lost worldwide every day. "These children are dying for reasons we can prevent. They do not have to die, but they do. I believe that number should be zero."

To support UNICEF's efforts "towards zero," please visit the US Fund's Donate by Program page.

In a post from January 23, 2008, this blog noted that both global child mortality and abortion rates were declining.

Could it be that measures which benefit already-born kids simultaneously benefit unborn children, and vice versa--contrary to the either/or, zero sum thinking of the US abortion debate and its exports?

And what if the approach of striving for zero preventable child deaths were applied more systematically to abortion and its root causes?

Incidentally, such an approach already meshes quite well with with global efforts to reduce maternal mortality.

Paid Sick Days, Anyone? (Or, More from the Annals of Only in America)

2008-09-25T18:57:00.008-05:00

The National Partnership for Women and Families (US) asks, "Did you know that 57 million working people don't have a single paid sick day? And nearly 100 million workers don't have paid sick days to care for a sick child."

While the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees up to three months unpaid leave, this doesn't help the vast majority of US workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Just taking off a few unpaid days can spell economic disaster.

This situation, nonexistent in the more highly developed European social welfare states, falls particularly hard on parents who have disabilities/health conditions, and/or who have disabled/chronically ill children. Among other ills it inflicts...it contributes to the pressures upon pregnant women who have disabilities and/or unborn kids with disabilities to have abortions or *else.*

Paid sick days shouldn't be an unattainable luxury. They should be available and accessible to all, like any other human right. In the US? Please join the national movement for paid sick days!!

What if Pregnant Teen Bristol Palin Were Black?

2008-09-24T14:39:00.006-05:00

Young black women in Chicago address the racial double standard surrounding teen pregnancy. Global Girls, a group for promoting young black women's self-esteem, makes performance art out of this particularly painful more-than-a-bit of racism:

"Oh, let my black momma be the candidate for VP And the unwed teen be a nappy head girl like me Wonder how the headlines would have read then Another at-risk child about to begin and another year the party won’t win"

Writer Jessica Young muses whether right to lifers would be so quick to make a "poster child" of Bristol Palin if she were African American.

These are all excellent points, especially considering the dearth of people of color in the prolife movement as such. A single-issue focus on opposing abortion, detached from a comprehensive vision for affirming life after as well as before birth, apparently does not resonate with many people of color. Not that the prochoice movement resonates much, either, from what I can see.

And there is another matter I wonder about that I haven't heard anyone discuss yet (though maybe I'm not listening in the proper places). Through her father's side, Bristol Palin, and thus her unborn child, are part Yupik (a Native Alaskan group). I don't know how much or little, and I have no idea how she self-identifies. But technically, even by some definitions that come from within communities of color instead of being imposed on them, they are people of color. Yet they are perceived as white. Once again in America, the full, complex story of multiracial identity goes underground.

Did Susan B. Anthony Have a Chip on Her Shoulder? Ask the Susan B. Anthony List

2008-09-23T09:34:00.005-05:00

The Susan B. Anthony List is a US organization whose professed goal is to increase the ranks of prolife women politicians. It links itself to the prolife stance of early feminists, including its namesake, Susan B. Anthony.

However..among other problems...the organization's blog, suzyb.org, does not appear to be a place where cries for justice for anyone but the unborn and their conservative white female defenders are well-received. Indeed, on at least three different recent occasions, such expressions of valid anger were dismissed as gratuitous, ridiculous, mere products of a "chip on the shoulder."

--The blog effuses uncritically over Sarah Palin's profession of advocacy for the disabled. But when I questioned what that meant for the lives of disabled Americans generally, and pointed out that the ideology of "government waste" often amounted to treating us as disposable humans (hint, hint, like the unborn), I was told by a commenter, "Gee, Marysia, I think you need to knock that chip off your shoulder".

--The blog mocks National Organization for Women members for being "angry" and "spiteful" feminists and wearing it on their t shirts...no mention of what might be behind that purportedly gratuitous rage. You know, stuff like, oh, violence against women, and unequal pay for equal work.

--The blog exults in Michelle Obama's recent lack of public visibility in her husband's campaign. A commenter says outright what the post does not in so many words: "Voters have recognized that she is a woman with a 'black' chip on her shoulder, and her harshness was not going over well. I think they're hiding her!" Was this commenter perhaps the same Anonymous who told me to get the chip off my shoulder? Whether it was the same person or not...same diminishing and silencing technique applied to "troublemakers."

But such dismissive stereotyping of people who challenge the powers that be is nothing new. Indeed, it can be found in the very same herstory that the Susan B. Anthony List lays claim to in its very own choice of name.

As Lynn Sherr documents in her wonderfully eye-opening Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words, Susan B. Anthony was routinely dismissed as a "vinegar-visaged virago," "stiff," "cold," "aggressive," "constantly howling," "laboring under strong feelings of hatred towards men.” Yet, as Sherr points out abundantly, Anthony was actually "selfless, diplomatic, elegant, charming, generous, friendly, determined, polite, curious, open, amusing, self-possessed, and, once again, selfless."

I don't know if Anthony's era actually talked in so many words of chips on shoulder, but it's clear that they had the concept, and deployed it for the same minimizing purposes. The book behind Nonviolent Choice, ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, substantially documents the awfully familiar-sounding stereotypes levelled against early feminists in general...as well as Anthony's own stance against abortion.

I would like to ask the SBA List and its supporters: did Anthony and her peers have chips on their shoulders?

The Prolife & Pro LGBT Group PLAGAL Joins the Blogosphere

2008-09-22T12:37:00.004-05:00

While some antiabortionists are virulently LGBT-phobic, still others believe that prolife means the lives and wellbeing of LGBT persons as much as unborn children and pregnant women. A number of such prolifers are LGBT themselves.

Luckily there are friendly places online for LGBT and LGBT-allied prolifers. Nonviolent Choice is one of them. For example, we believe that choice in pregnancy prevention includes the right to choose same-sex relationships. (If you want to recommend any more LGBT-friendly topics or websites to us, please recommend them.)

But the hands down best prolife advocate by and/or for by LGBT persons is PLAGAL, the Prolife Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, a US based nonprofit that has been around since 1990, making bridges between communities that are too often miscast as diametrical opponents.

PLAGAL has long maintained a website at www.plagal.org And now PLAGAL has joined the blogosphere at prolifegays.blogspot.com/

Welcome, PLAGAL, from a longtime fan.

Directory Upgrade/Apologies for Down Time

2008-09-12T13:58:00.001-05:00

Apologies if you have not been able to get into and navigate around our Directory within the last couple days. We were trying to improve the main menu at the top of each page without adding to the bandwidth.

The Palin Pregnancy Uproar

2008-09-02T09:00:00.011-05:00

Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin identifies herself as a prolife feminist. Now I do not understand how that self-description squares with her poor environmental record, or her vote for abstinence-only sex education (among other things). But evidently (as of 2006, anyway) she is pro contraception. And to all signs, she has personally responded to not only her own but her daughter's crisis pregnancy as one hopes a prolife feminist would.

The US is all abuzz about the just publicly disclosed unplanned pregnancy of her 17 year old Bristol. The governor and her family decided to make this disclosure in the wake of ugly rumors that she was actually the grandmother and Bristol the mother of Trig, Sarah's baby born earlier this year with Down Syndrome.

The rumors evidently first got publicity from a diary posted on the liberal blogging site Daily Kos. It has since been removed, but, wanting to go to the source and form my own impressions, I saw it before it was.

I think people of any political school could agree, it was pretty low down. Some of the inhouse comments on the diary said as much, questioning whether this was slander and do you really want to sacrifice a teen just to bring down a candidate.

But others exulted about the Antichoice Harridan 'n' Hypocrite Exposed!, even saying that Gov. Palin shamed and used her daughter and took credit for not aborting the baby so she could look like a big fat antichoice saint and make others feel guilty for having abortions.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama responded to the uproar in a dignified manner. He pronounced candidates' families and especially their children (he is a protective father) off-limits in the campaign. And he promised to fire any of his own staff who spread around any of the abovementioned rumors. Barack did note that his own mother gave birth to him at age 18--suggesting even further sympathy with the Palin clan.

I think the whole onslaught against Sarah Palin and her daughter just goes to show, in a writ especially large fashion, the point Linda Naranjo-Huebl made in this blog not two weeks ago about the onslaught of ugly judgments still heaped on women with crisis or unplanned pregnancies.

I can only hope that Barack Obama's empathy for the Palin family-- along with Sarah Palin's now fully public welcome of not only her own fetus with Down Syndrome, but her pregnant daughter, and unborn grandchild-- will suggest something to the US collective consciousness/conscience. Namely, that there are other and better ways of responding to difficult pregnancies than such judgmentality-- whether that judgmentality puts on progressive or conservative clothes.

End "This Shameful Neglect" With the White Ribbon Alliance

2008-08-25T11:53:00.006-05:00

Please endorse this plea for life just in from the White Ribbon Alliance. Thank you.

Dear Friend,

Tell the Global Leaders

... every woman has the right to health care in pregnancy and childbirth.

In September, the global leaders will attend an emergency United Nations meeting in New York on the Millennium Development Goals - the 8 goals world leaders set in 2000 to tackle poverty and global inequities.

Yet Millennium Development Goal 5, to reduce maternal deaths by 75% by the year 2015, is the one Goal on which virtually no progress has been made so far. Despite recent commitments by the African Union and the European Union to set milestones for skilled birth attendants and family planning, world leaders lack the political will to take decisive steps to reverse the trend of declining investment in maternal health. It is time to make our voices heard so that this shameful neglect of women and their newborns comes to an end.

It will take you two minutes to sign this letter - and in that time two women around the world will lose their lives during pregnancy or childbirth because they don't have access to basic health services. This action will demonstrate to the global leaders that the public will no longer accept this injustice.

http://www.whiteribbonalliance.org/takeaction

We are aiming to collect at least 500,000 signatures to represent the 500,000 women who die during pregnancy or childbirth each year -- we need your help! Please spread this message widely amongst your networks. We will continue reaching out for more ways to get involved in the campaign.

Please join us.

We look forward to hearing from you and continued collective efforts.

Best regards,
Betsy McCallon
Senior Program Advisor/Promise to Mothers Lost Project Manager
bmccallon@whiteribbonalliance.org
202-777-0933

Global Secretariat
One Thomas Circle NW, Suite 200 Washington, DC USA
tel: 202.775.9680 fax: 202.775.9694
wra1@whiteribbonalliance.org

Copyright (c) 2008 White Ribbon Alliance, All Rights Reserved

Click here if you are having trouble viewing this electronic newsletter.
http://www.promisetomothers.org/emailblast/

Major Update to Our Directory

2008-08-20T13:48:00.004-05:00

Under Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Mother And Child Health (During and After Pregnancy), the Nonviolent Choice Directory lists the ministry of health, its equivalent, or other health authority for almost every country and territory on Earth.

We have just updated this list. Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced, or worse, by our laggardness in doing so.

Stepping Up for Pregnant Women & Unborn Children In Her Own Home: Reflections from Linda Naranjo-Huebl

2008-08-13T15:22:00.022-05:00

Linda Naranjo-Huebl is a professor of women's and American ethnic literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She lives parttime in her hometown of Denver, Colorado, where she and her family personally took into their own home dozens of pregnant women in need of emergency shelter. The women came to them through Alternatives Pregnancy Center, an agency founded and staffed by prolife women, many of whom identify proudly as feminists.

Naranjo-Huebl has borne considerable witness to the ongoing and harsh realities of gender discrimination and their role in abortion. She wrote about her years of service to beleaguered women in unplanned/crisis pregnancies for
ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, the book behind the Nonviolent Choice Directory. The following is an excerpt from her story, reprinted here with her permission.

The crisis, or crises, leading to the need for emergency housing during pregnancy became our [family's] own upon each woman's arrival, and I found myself increasingly angry and frustrated at those social forces that make pregnancy so difficult in the first place. Many people believe that as a society we have progressed from those days when a single woman's pregnancy was cause for ostracism or even punishment...

[But] women facing unplanned or inopportune pregnancies are subjected to all kinds of insults, censure, discrimination, and abandonment. They are aware of a continual undercurrent of judgment against them, including negative assumptions about their morals, their intelligence, their judgment, their self-discipline and sense of responsibility.

They also face more overt discrimination. We have witnessed, and vigorously protested, substandard treatment...by medical establishments, schools, and various social service agencies, not to mention their personal friends, family, and even their church communities. They are also routinely discriminated against in the workplace, if they can even get a job...

Our years of experience also taught us that reactions to unplanned pregnancy are frequently influenced by class and ethnicity. Middle- and upper-class Anglos tend to react more negatively to an unplanned pregnancy...[S]ome panicky middle- and upper-class white parents..would almost prefer their teenage daughter die than have a baby. Contrastingly, while aware that unplanned pregnancies come with a financial burden, the Latino, African American, and working class communities less often regard the situation as a major crisis. In my own extended Latino family, those most likely to consider an unplanned pregnancy as serious problem are those who are rising on the economic ladder.

We can see how these different cultural and economic perspectives extend beyond our borders. Women in the Two Thirds World frequently criticize American feminists for their emphasis on abortion rights instead of equal educational and economic opportunities for women. They tell us that children are not the problem; it's the systems into which they are born...

...When a controlling man (or parents) orders his girlfriend to get an abortion and she chooses otherwise, she is frequently motivated by a growing unconditional attachment and loyalty to her child and also to herself. Psychologists tell us that the "good enough" mother has a healthy sense of self and that her love for her child is an extension of her love for herself.

Abortion, then, can be interpreted, at one level, as an act against onself, against one's own identity. By contrast, the young women who defies boyfriend, husband, parents. friends, or authorities in carrying her child to term performs a heroic act that affirms and builds up her own sense of self while at the same time [she acknowledges the equally valuable life of her child.

And it is appropriate that we too affirm these equally valuable lives...and step up to help her overcome the obstacles she faces...

Both Sides of The Question, "What If Your Mother Had Aborted You?"

2008-08-09T21:28:00.004-05:00

Frances Kissling, longtime leader of Catholics for a Free Choice, flips around the question that "antichoicers" have asked her for years: What If Your Mother Had Aborted You?"

What if your mother's life would have been significantly happier and healthier if she had not had you? If you as a fetus had the capacity to make decisions, would you have given your life for your mother's life, health and happiness?

Kissling speaks of the miserable conditions under which her own mother conceived, bore, and raised her, and concludes:

As a fetus I would have gladly given up my chance to enter the world and become Frances Kissling to have given my mother a better chance at happiness. Far too much is made of a mother's obligations to her children and far too little of what a child's love for her mother means. If fetuses could love, I think they would be as passionate in defense of their mothers as born children become.

If we are going to imagine, as some do, fetuses as part of the human community, we are going to have to accept that if they could make decisions, they might be as willing to sacrifice for others as we demand that women and only women be.

Kissling is right to challenge the demand for women-only sacrifice. But is it children per se that demand total, all-out, lifetime, self-annihilating sacrifices of women? Is it the fault of the children? Or is the doing of a culture that has too long forced a "choice" between women and their own children, born and already born, and then washed its hands completely of its obligation to fully, actively care for all human beings?

It wassn't right, the male irresponsibility, poverty, stunted life chances, and (no doubt ethnic prejudice) that were forced on Kissling's mother, the daughter herself of a Polish immigrant family. She did not deserve those things. No human does. But would the answer have been for Frances Kissling's life to be taken away even as Frances was beginning?

Why does it have to come down to this, always, always, it seems, when abortion is under discussion--either the sacrificing of the woman, or the sacrificing of the child? How devaluing this setup is to both.

I once heard someone define abortion as the cutting off of human potential, whether before or after birth. By that understanding, our culture aborted Frances Kissling's mother. But why must the solution have been the abortion of Frances Kissling?

If fetuses and women alike were fully embraced as part of the human community--wouldn't they both get sprung from this trap of either-or lethal sacrifice? Wuldn't the community pitch in to first reduce sacrifice on anyone's part to an absolute minimum and then distrubute whatever part it could of whatever is left around as many shoulders as possible?

Ending the Catholic Ban on Contraception

2008-07-25T13:26:00.004-05:00

Catholic groups ask pope to end contraception ban

The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a nonsectarian service for people of all faiths and none. And so we defend the personal liberties of people who wish not to be sexually active or use contraceptives like we defend the liberties of those who do choose to engage in these practices. We also recognize that on many other fronts, the Catholic Church has been a real and welcome advocate for the oppressed.

That much said, we welcome the above news. The anticontraception stance of one of humanity's largest faiths has had profoundly negative consequences upon the human rights of life and bodily integrity. For one, how many abortions has it lead to?

Trying to Address the Charge of Prolife Hypocrisy

2008-07-11T14:13:00.012-05:00

I welcome conversation with people who identify as prochoice on abortion. I especially welcome opportunities for cooperative action to reduce abortions and unintended pregnancies and pursue any other areas of reproductive justice where there is agreement.

Of course not every prochoice person poses it, but over the years and decades I have repeatedly bumped up against--or run smack into--a particular question that saddens and frustrates me every time. Because the energy put into dealing with this question--on both "sides" of it--would be much better spent on, say, passing out condoms or lobbying politicians on family leave together.

Frequently I try to answer it, and the ante gets upped, and upped, and upped, till I don't know what to do.

The question is this: "You say you're prolife, but what are you doing for people *after* they're born?"

And that's a fair enough question. I agree, prolife needs to encompass *every* life. And it is woefully inadequate to just sit around believing that. Prolife in the sense of *every* life is an endless, endless call to ever-expanding responsibilities, because as the slogan goes, "no one is free till everyone is free."

But what bothers me about the question is the way it's often asked. With preemptive, gotcha! scorn, as if it were of course a rhetorical question whose only possible answers could be "Absolutely nothing" or "Not only absolutely nothing, I am all about undermining and killing the already-born!"

I often try to answer "Why, I am personally engaged in doing ABCD to affirm already-born lives, and have been for decades." (I really hate being backed into this position. If I don't say anything, I am complicit with a misrepresentation. If I say something, it sounds like I'm trying to make myself look good to puff up my big fat antichoice ego...Sigh....)

Sometimes the "what are you doing" question opens up an opportunity for real conversation, engagement, and reciprocal understanding. And more power to those moments.

But sometimes, this is what happens instead.

Any one (or more) of the following responses:
--"No you haven't, you're a liar as well as a hypocrite."
--"So what if you've done ABC, you haven't done XYZ."
--"Well, then, you're the only one."

If I try to explain that I'm telling the truth, and divulge more evidence to that end, then because I have been decided beforehand, by definition to be a liar as well as a hypocrite, no evidence I produce will be admitted to the questioner's scrutiny.

If I say that in fact I have done XYZ as well as ABC, I am scrutinized over whether I have done GHIJ. GHIJ tends to be a demand absurdly beyond any reasonably striving person's sheer capacities.

Or it amounts to a demand that I violate the integrity of the beliefs I hold about abortion, as if my deeds ABC or XYZ cannot possibly count towards caring for the already-born unless and until I am in complete and full agreement with my questioner. (Sheesh...I would never tell a prochoice person that their work on preventing child abuse or promoting sex education doesn't mean a flip because we disagree on abortion--that would be really unfair.)

If I try to explain that I'm not some bizarre exception, that in fact I have lots of company, like so and so, and such and such, and this and that and the other...then somehow my evidence is found wanting, and wanting, and wanting. And the more I produce that evidence, the more inadequate it is judged to be.

I don't mean to imply that only prochoicers have such rigid, unbending attitudes towards their purported "enemies." I'm sure prochoicers are subjected to similar dynamics sometimes when they are trying to respond to charges like "antilife," "antiGod," and "antifamily." I'm not denying that--I'm just speaking of what I know in my own personal experience.

But I do want to ask both "camps": why do we do this to one another? And why don't we stop it? What have we got to lose?

Tips for Contraceptive Success: A Reprise

2008-07-09T19:53:00.004-05:00

To reprise our reprints of About.com Contraception Guide Dawn Stacey's advice on preventing contraceptive failure:

To learn more about contraception, please visit Dawn's work on About.com.

Or you can consult the Nonviolent Choice Directory's extensive Pregnancy Prevention resources. The Nonviolent Choice Directory also sells nonprescription family planning and safer sex items through our website.

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent IUD Failure

2008-07-09T19:05:00.007-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Birth control must be used consistently and according to instructions in order to attain maximum effectiveness. In order to lower the chances of birth control failure, follow these suggestions if you curretnly use a Mirena IUD or a ParaGard IUD.

If you have any questions about your birth control method, please contact your healthcare provider. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: N/A

Tips:
1. It is especially important to check every few days for the first few weeks after an IUD insertion to make sure that it is still properly in place. You should also feel for the strings after your first period since the insertion. Additionally, you should schedule an appointment with your doctor after your first period (and no longer than 3 months after the insertion) to make sure that the IUD is still in place.

2. Make sure to check the strings each month to ensure that the IUD is still in place (your doctor can provide instructions on how to do this).

3. An IUD must be removed if it becomes partially expelled. It is a wise idea to check your pads and tampons during your period to make sure that the IUD has not fallen out.

Most pregnancies happen to Mirena or ParaGard IUD users when their IUDs slide out without them realizing it. Even though the chance of pregnancy while an IUD is in place is extremely low, if it does happen, you should have the IUD removed as soon as you are aware that you're pregnant.

4. If you cannot feel the strings, make sure to use an alternative, back-up contraceptive method, and call your healthcare provider to make sure that the IUD has not been displaced.

5. Some woman may have the IUD strings cut shorter if they are felt by the woman’s sexual partner. When this is the case, sometimes the strings are cut so short that the woman cannot actually check for the strings. Regular IUD checkups can be done at the same time as your periodic gynecological exam.

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: Medications and Inhibitors that Lower Hormonal Contraception Effectiveness

2008-07-09T18:54:00.004-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M. Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Certain medications, antibiotics, and supplements can increase the chances of oral contraceptive (birth control pill), NuvaRing and Ortho Evra patch failure. These drugs and medications can cause interactions when used with some hormonal contraceptives.

If you have any questions about birth control methods, please contact your healthcare provider. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

1. Antibiotics

Some antibiotics used to treat infections may cause the Pill to be less effective.

The following antibiotics/antibacterial agents may interfere with pill use:

•Rifampin: used to treat tuberculosis or meningitis
•Rifabutin: used to treat mycobacterium avium complex
•Tetracycline
•Rifapentine: used to treat TB
•Some penicillin derivatives or cephalosporin (Keflin) may also decrease pill efficiency.

It is impossible to determine if taking an antibiotic will interfere with pill use (since each person's body responds differently), so it is wise to use a back-up method while on antibiotic medication as a precaution and ask your doctor.

2. Anti-HIV Protease Inhibitors

Ritonavir is an antiviral drug that is used to treat human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. If you are using this or another medication for the treatment of the HIV virus or AIDS, ask your healthcare provider if your specific medication will decrease the effectiveness of the pill.

3. Anti-Seizure Medications

Barbiturate medicines for producing sleep or treating seizures (convulsions) could interfere with the effectiveness of the Pill. Examples of these types of medications would be:

•Phenobarbital
•Primidone

The following medications can also help with seizure (convulsion) control in certain types of epilepsy and also treat nerve-related pain. Additionally, Topiramate may also be prescribed to help prevent migraine headaches. These mediactions, as well, may lower pill, nuvaring, or the patch's effectiveness:

•Oxcarbazepine
•Carbamazepine
•Phenytoin
•Topiramate

Please inquire with your healthcare provider if you are taking any of these medications.

4. Antidepressants

Certain medicines prescribed for mental depression, such as Nefazodone, can alter hormone levels. Inquire about these types of medications with your healthcare provider if you are currently being treated with a specific antidepressant.

5. Anti-Fungal Medication

Anti-Fungal Medications, especilally the ones that are typically taken orally for yeast infections can lower the effectivenes of the pill. Additionally, Griseofulvin, an anti-fungal used to treat fungus infections of the skin, hair, and nails may interfere with oral contraceptives or other hormonal birth control.

If you are using one of these types of medications, ask your healthcare provider if your specific medication will decrease the effectiveness of the pill, ring, or patch.

6. Diabetes Medication

Some of the medications for diabetes, including Troglitazone and Pioglitazone can interact with birth control pills. Make sure to discuss these types of medications with your healthcare provider to see if they will affect the use of your oral contraceptives.

7. Anxiety Treatments

Ask your healthcare provider if your specific anti-anxiety medication will decrease the effectiveness of the Pill as certain medicines used to treat anxiety or sleeping problems, such as Diazepam or Temazepam, may interfere with successful combination contraceptive use.

8. Natural Supplements

In addition to prescription medications, certain supplements have been shown to lower the effectiveness of hormonal contraception. These include:

•Soy Isoflavones - natural substances obtained from the soybean plant which claim to reduce the intensity of menopause-related hot flashes and to help maintain strong bones
•St. John's Wort - an herb or dietary supplement that is being promoted for its ability to improve mildly depressed moods

9. Vomiting and Diarrhea

Although not a medication, vomiting and diarrhea may also lower the effectiveness of the pill.

Additionally, the medication, Aprepitant, which is used to prevent or treat nausea and vomiting vcan also interfer with the oral contraceptive effectiveness. If you are experiencing these symptoms or taking this medication, use an additional method of birth control and contact your healthcare provider for advice.

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent Oral Contraceptive Failure

2008-07-09T18:43:00.006-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide

If you use the Pill, it has to be taken at the same time every day; in fact, if you forget to take just 1 birth control pill, you increase your chances of becoming pregnant. During a cycle, if 2 or more pills are missed, the chance of this method failing increases dramatically, especially if an alternative method of birth control (like a condom) is not used. Having a routine is a good way to reduce the likelihood of this happening. It has been show that having a set daily routine can affect birth control consistency. Women without a customary routine are more than 3 times as likely to miss 2 or more pills per cycle.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: N/A

Tips:

A woman should make sure to use the Pill consistently and continually. She should take it at the same time, every day.
An individual who uses the pill should understand how to take the pill properly and what to do if she accidently misses a pill.
If a woman misses 2 or more pills during any cycle, she should use an alternate method of birth control as a back-up.
It is helpful to associate pill use with some other regular daily activity (such as taking it before a person brushes her teeth). This way, taking the pill becomes part of a routine.
A female should remember to bring an extra pack of pills when traveling if she will finish the old pack while away.
It is important to consult with a medical doctor about using a back-up contraceptive method if a woman is prescribed antibiotics or is taking certain herbal supplements or other medications.
If you have any questions about your birth control method, please contact your healthcare provider. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

(Note: See our next reprint from Dawn, Medications and Inhibitors That Lower Hormonal Contraceptive Effectiveness.)

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How To Decrease Failure with the Fertility Awareness Method

2008-07-09T18:29:00.006-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Natural Family Planning methods must be used consistently and according to instructions in order to attain maximum effectiveness. In order to lower the chances of birth control failure, follow these suggestions if you use fertility awareness as your contraceptive method.

If you have any questions about your birth control method, please contact your healthcare provider. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: N/A

Tips:

It is essential that you understand how fertility awareness methods work.
It is helpful to have knowledge about the female body and how ovulation and fertilization take place.
Try to make sure that you are using this method precisely and consistently. If not, failure could occur.
It is critical, with natural family planning, that you accurately predict when your fertile period is.
Make certain that you have correctly figured out your ovulation pattern; then, abstain before and after your fertile time..
Remember, it only takes one unprotected act of sexual intercourse to become pregnant.

What You Need:

Calendar
Fertility Charts
Cycle Beads (optional)
Basal Thermometer

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent Diaphragm Failure

2008-07-09T18:13:00.005-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Contraception must be used consistently and according to instructions in order to attain maximum effectiveness. If you use a diaphragm, follow these suggestions in order to lower the chances of contraceptive failure.

If you have any questions about your birth control method, please contact your healthcare provider. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: N/A

Here's How:

Put spermicide inside your diaphragm AND around the rim EVERY time you use it.
After inserting it, make sure that the diaphragm is covering your cervix (as directed by your doctor).
Wait at least 6 hours after sex to remove diaphragm (do not take it out any sooner).

Tips:

Remember to add additional spermicide into the vagina between each new sexual acts or if more than 2 hours have gone by since the diaphragm has been inserted.
Diaphragms may fail if they are moved out of place by the penis thrusting against the cervix.
Using a condom and spermicide with these devices (especially during your fertile period) can result in the greatest chances of contraceptive success.

(Note: Couples who do not wish the pregnancy risk (however small) of condom and spermicide use during the fertile period [or any other time in the cycle, for that matter] have the option of practicing Outercourse & Oral Sex.--Marysia)

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How To Respond to Men's Excuses for Not Wanting to Wear a Condom

2008-07-09T17:55:00.006-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

(We commend Dawn for addressing this critical component of success with condoms. With condoms as with other methods, women's sexual assertiveness and equitable relationships between male and female partners are essential to preventing unintended pregnancies and abortions, not to mention sexually transmitted infections like HIV/AIDS.--Marysia)

I’ve heard all types of reasons why men don’t want to wear condoms. But, by not using them, your safety is at risk. Using condoms every time you have sex offers the best protection from catching an STD, including HIV . It is even suggested to use a condom if on The Pill (or other prescription method). If a man says that he is “too large” to fit into a condom, open one up, put your hands together (like you’re clapping), roll the condom over your hands, then spread them apart about 12 inches wide – ask him if he is bigger than that!

Here's some excuses men give and responses you can use.

Difficulty: N/A

Time Required: 15 Minutes to Practice Responses

Here's How:

1. If he says: "It ruins the mood."
How to respond: "Having unsafe sex puts me out of the mood. For good!"

2. If his excuse is: "A condom spoils my enjoyment of sex.”
How to respond: “I can't enjoy sex unless we’re protected.”

3. If he says: "If you really love me, you should trust me."
How to respond: “It is because I love you that I want to be sure we’re both protected.”

4. If he complains: "I can’t feel anything when I’m wearing a condom.”
How to respond: “Many condoms have extra features to actually make sex better, and that you will both be better able to relax knowing you are safeguarding yourselves against STD’s and unintended pregnancy. Plus, men can actually experience more pleasure with a ribbed condom than without one at all.”

5. If he says: "Condoms don’t really work; most of them get busted."
How to respond: "If we use it the right way, its 98% effective."

6. If his excuse is: "Wearing a condom is uncomfortable."
How to respond: Suggest a different brand or size.
Or, if you are feeling a bit feisty, you could come back with, "Yes, and so is being pregnant for 9 months and then having to give birth."

7. If he says: "Don’t tell me that you actually think you’ll catch something from me."
How to respond: "I’m sure I won’t, but it's better to be safe than sorry."

8. If his objection is: “But you’re on the pill.”
How to respond: "The pill won’t protect us from STD’s that we may not even know we have – a condom will give us that protection.”

9. If he insists: “But we’ve had sex without a condom before.”
How to respond: “That that was a bad decision, and I don’t want to make it again. We were lucky, and I am not chancing it again.”

10. If his excuse is: "I don't know how to use a condom the right way."
How to respond: "I’ll do it for you."

Tips:
1. Don’t be afraid to ask your partner to use a condom because you think he won’t trust you. If this is so, then it may mean that you don’t trust him enough to ask him to use a condom.

2. Remember, there are many reasons to use a condom. Learn all of the ways a condom can protect both of you, so you can remind him (and yourself) of why you should use a condom every time you have sexual intercourse. Don’t let your partner’s excuses stop you from protecting yourselves.

3. Read these ways of how you can respond to your partner. If it will make you feel more prepared, rehearse them; then, you can be ready to challenge him if he gives you an excuse for not wanting to wear a condom.

4. Remind yourself that asking someone to use a condom shows that you have respect for yourself and for them, so refuse to have sex with someone who does not respect you or themselves enough to use protection.

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent Condom Failure

2008-07-09T17:42:00.007-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Over the counter contraceptives are not perfect. Let’s face it, condoms can break and tear during sex. When condoms break, semen can leak out, so the use of vaginal spermicides with condoms can help to increase your pregnancy protection should condom failure occur. (Typically, 2 - 5% of all condoms tear during use. This can generally be prevented by making sure that you use condoms the correct way. If you have any questions about your birth control method, please contact your doctor. You will lower your chances for birth control failure if you have a proper and thorough understanding of how to use your contraceptive.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: N/A

Here's How:

Read the directions.
Before use, inspect the condom for any obvious tears.
Put lubrication inside the condom. (See Dawn's note below about proper lubricants to use anywhere near a condom.--Marysia)
Make sure you are putting the condom on the right way by leaving room at the top and rolling it on in the proper direction.
Lubricate the outside of the condom. Make sure to use only water-based products intended for use with condoms (such as KY jelly, Astroglide, etc). Any oil-based or petroleum-based products will compromise the integrity of the condom.
After ejaculation, make sure to take the condom off properly by holding the rim firmly, withdrawing penis, and sliding the condom off (away from the vagina).
Tie the condom in a knot - away from the vagina. Then throw it out in a garbage can.

Tips:

Don’t use condoms once their expiration date has passed.
Make sure to store condoms properly (not in hot places).
Watch out for fingernails and/or jewelry which can also cause tears in the condom.

A final note about condom failure, sometimes, no matter what you do, a condom will break. It is always possible that the condom could have been damaged sometime during or after production. Remember, no method is 100% effective!

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: What Leads to Contraceptive Failure?

2008-07-09T17:24:00.005-05:00

By Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide
(Reprinted with her permission)

Question: What Leads to Contraception Failure?

Unintended pregnancy is a significant concern affecting thousands of people each year. According to a study published in Family Planning Perspectives, 50% of all the pregnancies in the United States were unintended; this includes those conceptions that resulted in abortions, miscarriages or live births. Surprisingly, half of the women faced with these unplanned pregnancies were using contraception during the month that they conceived. Because of these high numbers, it is vital that we know the main reasons for contraception failure as well as some of the risk factors associated with it.

Answer: Contraceptive Failure Varies by Method.

Your contraceptive method of choice greatly impacts your ability to avoid an intended pregnancy. Contraceptive failure can result from a natural malfunction of the birth control method itself. Research has shown that the use of longer acting methods, which require less for the individual to do, tend to help minimize the chances for user error. These methods (like Depo Provera injections, Implanon implants, ParaGard and Mirena IUDs and sterilization) result in the lowest "typical user" rate of contraceptive failure.

When comparing contraceptive effectiveness,

• "Typical use" refers to failure rates for women who do not consistently or always correctly use their birth control.
• "Perfect use" refers to failure rates for those whose use is consistent and always correct.

Demographics Play a Role in Contraceptive Failure

Marriage status:
• 17% of unmarried, cohabiting women experienced contraceptive failure during the first year of contraceptive use.

Age:
•16% of adolescents (aged 19 or under) and 13% of women aged 20 - 24 experienced birth control failure during the first year of use.

Income:
•Contraception failure rates are higher for low-income women.
•Those with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level are almost two times more likely to experience birth control failure than their higher income counterparts.

Some contraceptive methods are more prone to failure than others. Discover ways to decrease the chances of your contraception failing you.

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

Tips for Contraceptive Success: Introduction to Our Reprint Series from Dawn Stacey, M.Ed., LMHC, About.com Contraception Guide

2008-07-09T17:15:00.007-05:00

Unfortunately, no method of contraception is 100% effective; a lot of political commitment and research is needed before that can ever happen.

But please don’t let that discourage you from trying your best! Most methods work pretty well at preventing pregnancy—especially if you use them correctly and consistently every single time you have penis-vagina intercourse.

Want to learn how to boost your odds of preventing unintended pregnancy? Dawn Stacey is a master’s level health educator and licensed mental health counselor who specializes in reproductive health work. She serves as Contraception Guide for the website About.com. She has graciously given us reprint permission for these physician-reviewed About.com articles she authored on preventing contraceptive failure. And for that we thank her. We hope you will, too.

For the rest of Dawn's reprints:

What Really Happened With Agata? Here's What Didn't Happen

2008-07-03T20:57:00.010-05:00

It's very difficult to piece everything together. There's a prolife and a prochoice version of the story.

But this month a 14 year old girl in Poland, identified in the press only by the pseudonym "Agata," had an abortion after being raped by a boy at her school and becoming pregnant.

Public furor raged over whether or not the girl had the individual right to have the abortion. Much has been made of the role of a prominent prochoice advocacy group in arranging the abortion, and about the prolife activists who sought to dissuade the young woman from having an abortion. Each enemy camp has accused the other of besieiging and pressuring her.

What really happened? I don't know, and there are a lot of things here that only time can tell, and some things that the world may never know. But it's very clear what *didn't* happen.

There has been no evidence that these selfsame interest groups are bombarding the rapist with their attentions, or imploring church and state re: his deed.

No evidence that anyone is focusing on the urgent need for boys and men to stop treating girls and women as disposable, inert pieces of meat, and finally learn to treat us as the inviolate, sacred beings all of us human beings are.

No one questions the one who committed the rape, let alone the deeply entrenched social institutions (not simply in Poland but everywhere) making his crime possible and keeping him under the radar, while national and global fury surrounds his two victims, the young woman and the child she conceived through his violence.

No one questions the violence behind the abortion. (Is there any clearer evidence that violence begets violence?)

As if rape were an eternal verity, an inevitability: either girls and women must have access to (the no matter how heart-shattering, lifetaking procedure of) abortion because there is rape and therefore abortion for always and forever...or the flip side of this: girls and women must endure, endure, endure the Salvific Pain of carrying children whose biological fathers are rapists.

Once again, males and masculinist institutions escape accountability for their crimes. And who takes the brunt of their actions?

Why, the same human beings who always are expected to take it. And take it, and take it, and take it, world without end....

No one is even asking, why didn't this young woman get the prompt emergency treatment all raped women need, including emergency contraception--what stopped that from happening? But that's too close to the crux of the matter: why the hell is there rape and why the hell is it allowed to continue...?

Now That's News: Respectful Dialogue on Abortion & Its Reduction

2008-06-26T18:28:00.010-05:00

Want to hear a thoughtful, respectful conversation about abortion among prochoice and prolife Friends (Quakers)?

The host of the "Spirit in Action" program on Northern Spirit Radio, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, presents one with Stan Becker, a prochoice specialist in population and public health, and peace psychologist Rachel MacNair, coeditor of ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, the book behind the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

To hear such a thing, you can download the mp3 file of Toward Taking Away the Occasion of Abortion.

This episode of the "Spirit in Action" program is named after an excellent pamphlet from Quaker Earthcare.

My impression is that the men dominated the conversation, as men tend to do, often without realizing it consciously. But they were trying to include Rachel's voice and listen, and that's a move out of intergender and prochoice/prolife dynamics as usual.

Please Sign Safe Motherhood Demands to the G8 Leaders

2008-06-25T15:53:00.006-05:00

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is sponsoring this petition to the leaders of the upcoming G8 summit, the conference of the world's biggest economic powers.

Noting that one woman dies from unsafe motherhood *every minute*, the petition calls upon the summit leaders to:

--grant "an additional 10 billion dollars annually for maternal, newborn and child health."

--"increase the number of trained health workers by 4 million."

--"acknowledge that maternal mortality is one of the best indicators for judging the success of a health system."

Please sign! Lives are on the line!

Educate Others--or Maybe Yourself!-- About LGBT Justice

2008-06-21T13:47:00.005-05:00

Soulforce is an interfaith, US-based group whose mission is "to cut off homophobia at its source -- religious bigotry. Soulforce uses a dynamic 'take it to the streets' style of activism to connect the dots between anti-gay religious dogma and the resulting attacks on the lives and civil liberties of LGBT Americans. We apply the creative direct action principles taught by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to peacefully resist injustice and demand full equality for LGBT citizens and same-gender families."

Soulforce publishes two great booklets to help anyone who wishes to educate others about the rights of LGBT people. They can be ordered in print, or read and downloaded from the following links:

What the Bible Says, and Doesn't Say, about Homosexuality by Reverend Mel White, Soulforce cofounder (in English and Spanish)

What the Science Says - And Doesn't Say - About Homosexuality by Jeff Lutes, Soulforce executive director

We are proud to say that the Nonviolent Choice Directory is listed in the acknowledgments of the science booklet!

So much prejudice against LGBT people results from a lack of knowledge. These booklets directly address the stereotypes in a spirit of love.

Tokophobia: It's Dreadful, But Treatable

2008-06-07T18:25:00.014-05:00

Tokophobia (sometimes spelled tocophobia) is a phobia of pregnancy and childbirth that may affect as many as six to ten percent of women. It is a dread far, far more intense and disabling than the anxiety that non-tokophobic women routinely feel about pregnancy and labor. And because pregnancy and childbirth are everywhere, women with tokophobia find it very difficult to avoid the triggers of their fear and panic.

Tokophobia afflicts women across lines of race, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and marital status. It saps the psyches of women who have never been pregnant or given birth and those who have. It happens to women who wish to be or are biological mothers and those who wish to be childfree. It befalls the prochoice and the prolife alike.

Yet many women do not feel free to be open about this phobia because it is so often met with trivializing or shaming responses. The cultural demand for women to become mothers, whether they wish to or not, only compounds the suffering of those with tokophobia, often generating feelings of severe guilt, inadequacy, helplessness, or rage. This demand is one important reason why tokophobia is so often driven into crippling secrecy.

Despite the pressures to keep tokophobia invisible and inaudible, it often has longlasting, profound, and negative consequences for women’s lives and wellbeing. These include but are not limited to:

Aversion to sex, especially sexual practices that have any risk of conception.
Loss of sexual pleasure.
Conflicts within and breakups of relationships, even relationships with loved and cherished partners.
Risktaking with contraception...
..Or its opposite—hyperanxious use of contraceptives with fixation on their failure rates, no matter how small, beyond the usual caretaking involved in successful family planning.
Avoidance of pregnancy even though one would prefer to have biological children.
Difficulty healing from past pregnancy traumas.
Abortions, self-induced or performed by health care workers.
Pregnancies which are carried to term and birthed at overwhelming, excruciating psychological cost to the mothers.
Preventable Caesarian sections.

Any phobia can cause a profound sense of helplessness. No matter how much one would rather be rid of it, it can feel inevitable and impossible to change. Yet the good news is that phobias, tokophobia included, are very highly treatable kinds of mental distress.

There are well-established, quite effective treatments for phobia, including certain kinds of talk therapy, in combination with anti-anxiety medications or without them (an important consideration, for instance, for women who are currently pregnant and may hesitate to take drugs).

Any responsible mental health worker will work with you to create a treatment plan that fits you and your unique needs and circumstances. It is very important to your healing that you are comfortable with your therapist and can trust him or her. If you are concerned about the costs of treatment, there are many ways to bring them down (see below).

Any kind of phobia, including tokophobia, can deter the sufferer from even thinking about treatment, let alone looking for it or going through with it. But the ultimate rewards of freedom from overwhelming fear may make it worth the effort and help you achieve the life you want, whether or not it includes motherhood.

To learn more about tokophobia:

Extreme Fear of Birth Pain Forces Women to Miscarry (from The Guardian)

Help for Women Suffering Years of Childbirth Trauma (from the Telegraph)
Hard Labour (from the Telegraph)
Pregnancy: “My Torment and Fear” (from the Belfast Telegraph)

Mother's Natural Birth Phobia (from BBC News)

PubMed.gov (put the terms “tokophobia” or “fear of childbirth” into the search box to find medical literature on the subject)

To help you find relief from tokophobia:

Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Learn more about phobias and treatment options.

How Do You Choose a Good Psychotherapist? (from Davis Mintun Professional Services)

Mental Health Services Locator From the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; see the FAQs for such topics as insurance and other ways to pay for your treatment; homelessness; and protection and advocacy for people with severe psychiatric problems. Not in the US? Maybe your country's chapter of the World Psychiatric Association or the Nonviolent Choice Directory's page on Access to Maternal Child Health Care (by Country, Territory, Etc.) (includes national Minstries of Health) can help you find the help you need.

How Can I Get Help Paying for My Prescriptions? From Mental Health America.

Birth Trauma Association

Ensure Access to Voluntary Sterilization (US)

2008-06-06T12:15:00.008-05:00

Sterilization abuse--involuntary sterilization--of the poor, people of color, and people with disabilities is a dirty open secret of US and global history that still hasn't gone away.

It is also a form of reproductive coercion to deny sterilization procedures to people who want them. I wonder how many undesired pregnancies and abortions arise from this. In the US, there are (at least) two, sometimes overlapping groups of women who face considerable barriers to voluntary sterilization:

Women under 30, no matter how durable, carefully considered, and thoughtful their decisions to become sterilized. Physicians may refuse them the services they need, claiming that they are too young to make such permanent decisions--especially if they are white, healthy, and/or not poor. The same physicians may still be all too eager to sterilize younger women from the traditionally coerced groups instead of exploring with them the full range of contraceptive options...eugenics is still with us...

Women who cannot afford sterilization, which out of pocket can cost thousands of dollars--and who has that sort of cash lying around? A majority of private health plans cover sterilization procedures, but what about women covered by the minority of plans that don't? What about uninsured women? What about poor women who rely on Title X and other public programs, who are constantly threatened by funding cuts and anti-contraceptive politics?

If you are from the US, please contact your elected officials and urge that they remove these barriers to voluntary, fully informed sterilization. You can point out both that (1) voluntary sterilization is a human right and (2) it is an effective way to reduce abortions.

Polish Prolifers Decry Tax Hike on Baby Clothes

2008-06-04T14:59:00.005-05:00

According to a report by Joanna Najfeld of Polskie Radio's External Service, Polish prolifers are protesting the European Commission's demand for Poland to increase the tax on baby clothes from 7% to 22%.

Paweł Wościcki from Polska Federacja Ruchów Obrony Życia, the Polish Federation of Pro-Life Movements, has appealed to Prime Minister Donald Tusk to oppose the tax hike, pointing out that

In a recent report, the European Union said that as many as 26% of children in Poland are in danger of poverty. This is more than in other EU countries. Why then, does the European Union want to make it more difficult for the families by telling Poland to increase the tax on baby articles? Especially since in other European countries, such as Great Britain, the tax on baby clothes is 0 percent. The British have higher incomes and levels of poverty are much lower.

I wish my Polish language skills were better--then I could delve further into why the Federation has taken on this issue. Is it that ultranationalistic paranoia which, somehow, absurdly equates the EU with genuine occupiers of Poland like the Kulturkampf Prussians, the Mein Kampf Nazis, and the Soviets? A stance that, like the one so prevalent in the States, links prolife to "family values" and tax cuts instead of a serious, substantive government commitment to a comprehensive social welfare system?

I can only hope that the Federation is motivated to ease hardships for impoverished families and thus to alleviate pressures towards abortion.

"Life Will Find A Way to Survive": An Interview With Ecofeminist Rosalie Bertell

2008-06-03T19:41:00.014-05:00

Rosalie Bertell, born in 1929, is a dual Canadian/US citizen, Roman Catholic nun, and endorser of the Consistent Life mission statement. A controversial but persevering ecofeminist, she works on healing and preventing global environmental disasters with a focus on “making the victims visible.” In 1986 she received the Right Livelihood Award, also called the “alternative Nobel Prize.” She is founder and past longtime director of the Toronto, Canada-based International Institute of Concern for Public Health. This nonprofit collaborates with impoverished people and communites of color devastated by radiation or chemical pollution.

Disclaimer: The views that Rosalie expresses are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the IICPH, nor those of her religious order, the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart.

MARYSIA: Please tell us a bit about yourself.

ROSALIE: My training and experience includes a Ph.d. in environmental epidemiology, and about 40 years of experience in international community health issues. I am retired, but still writing about the toxic exposures of the Gulf War veterans, the people living in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and the community disasters in the Pacific Islands, Bhopal, and Chernobyl.

MARYSIA: I've heard the nuclear threat--still a threat-- described as "planetary abortion." And global environmental destruction as "eco-abortion." In what ways do these forms of violence relate to the despair and suffering of a woman who feels she has no choice but to end her pregnancy? And to the fact that every year, millions of women and unborn children worldwide--even in such a materially wealthy nation as the US--end up in such a dire place?

ROSALIE: It has always touched my heart that women in the Nazi death camps and starving women in war-torn Africa give birth to babies and retain their hope in the future. While in affluent countries, giving birth is no longer a sacred trust with the future, but an intolerable burden for many! I do not think that women and natural mothering impulses have changed. Rather, it is our cultural and environmental surroundings which have changed.

MARYSIA: What are some of these changes?

ROSALIE: Since the early 1940s, the load of toxins and radiochemicals in the environment has increased steadily, and more and more children are born with congenital malformations and diseases. Asthma, autism, attention deficit, and other disabilities have become commonplace, making parenting more difficult.

Our culture scorns children who are “different,” for example, those who are hormonally disadvantaged. Although I have seen feminized fish, birds, and wild animals around the Great Lakes…homosexuality is considered by many fundamentalists to be “sinful.” Homosexual or bisexual children have a difficult time in our culture and even in their own birth family.

MARYSIA: Yes, the mistreatment of Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered people is a huge injustice. But are you saying that LGBT people are somehow "hormonally disadvantaged" from, for example, endocrine disruptor compounds? There were plenty of LGBT people long, long before any chemist dreamed up those compounds and unleashed them on the global environment.

We do not yet really know why one child is born heterosexual and the next person is born LGB or T. If it appears that LGBT people are more numerous now, it's probably because, despite continued discrimination, it's safer to be out and visible, now more than ever, at least in Canada, the US, and a few other nations.

Maybe this kind of human variability is something natural, inborn, and socially valuable in its own right. Edward Carpenter, a late 19th century/early 20th century ecofeminist and a gay man himself, predicted a time when LGBT people would take honored roles in the overall societal responsibility to care for children. Maybe this is the transformation that is struggling to be born right now?

ROSALIE: I think that there must be a "normal curve" of sexual behaviour – with people finding themselves somewhere along this curve either at one extreme or the other, with most people near to the middle of the curve. I think that endocrine disruptors are causing the curve to change from normal to an abnormal shape, perhaps at both extremes of this curve. No individual can be judged as having normally occurring sexual preferences or chemically/radio-chemically caused preferences.

The Bible does not condemn gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transsexuals. If you read the texts carefully, you will see that it only condemns "abnormal" sexual behaviour. If it is normal for one to be the way he or she is, then I believe it is permissible - barring of course violence to another person.

This seems to me to be a great problem of the churches which needs to be understood from God's point of view. If God indeed produces a whole range of sexual characteristics, they are "good" and "useful" in God's plan for the earth community of life. For humans to assume the right to change people's sexual orientation either by chemical or radioactive exposures is then very wrong to do. However, the wrong is on the polluter not the victim.

Irish families always had aunts and uncles who did not marry, but they were very involved with helping their siblings with the children, caring for parents, serving in the Church or social ministry, etc. They always led socially fruitful lives. I do not believe in selfish choices of lifestyle because it diminishes the person to choose to be selfish.

MARYSIA: Please say more about the environmentally related rise in children with disabilities.

ROSALIE: There are increasing problems on this, which is not yet openly faced, but running under the mental radar. I also think that the prolife groups have missed the issue of the right to bear healthy children. There are many barren couples who have been affected by radiation (nuclear fallout, local nuclear facilities, or even medical x-ray) and they are either unable to bear children or to bear healthy children. This is a violation of a very fundamental human right.

Surviving children of radiation- and toxic chemically- polluted parents are less able to cope with ordinary life on this planet, our home. We are also polluting the planet with more and more toxic chemical and radioactive waste dumps. Since they will have more to cope than my generation had to cope with, this is a fatally deteriorating problem which could eventually end in species extinction and maybe omnicide for all life.

MARYSIA: You've said, in the context of effective nonviolent actions for peace: "Life is stronger than death." What are some of the things that "ordinary" global citizens might possibly do to help afflicted pregnant women tap into that power of life, for themselves as well as their children?

ROSALIE: “Life” is communal, and strong communities can help us to have hope in the future and to free ourselves from the addiction to violent solutions of all of our problems in life. Abortion is a violent solution to such a problem.

Since the 1960s, we have been able to remove an embryo from one mammal and place it in the womb of another mammal. For example, a herd of cow embryos could be sent to Africa from the US in the wombs of a few rabbits, and then reimplanted in African cows.

This would also work for people, but the social implications of this seem insurmountable. We could together work out ways to preserve the life of the embryo/fetus and the reputation/economic viability of the mother.

On the Pacific Islands, babies belong to a family and not essentially to the birthparents (although they know their birthparents). There is no such thing as an illegitimate birth. Even young married couples give their first baby to the bride’s parents and their second to the groom’s parents. “Every home should have a child” is their social philosophy.

A friend of mine lost a teenage daughter to leukemia in French Polynesia, and at the wake, two local Polynesian families gave her and her husband two healthy babies, a boy and a girl. She was overwhelmed with both the grief and the joy of those babies. They brought the children up, knowing that these children were a special bond with the Polynesian people and especially the families who gave them the children. The girl is now a local medical doctor, having studied in California, while the boy is a successful technician at a local automobile shop.

Children are a right and a privilege; they belong to the community and have the potential of drawing families closer together. Yet the Pacific Islanders also realize that their islands have a “carrying capacity,” food in an amount which will sustain just so much life, and they stay within that capacity. This too is a community sense of what is ethical and helpful for survival.

We, as a North American community, seem to have lost these skills. I believe that they are dormant and could be revived as we change our social philosophy! We need to understand ourselves as part of our bioregion, and not as separate from nature and somehow licensed to exploit it!

MARYSIA: Anything else you feel is vital to say here?

ROSALIE: I think it is important to see ourselves as recipients of a beautiful and health giving planet. We need to use seeds with gratitude and humility, as a precious and valuable gift. We are currently in North America consuming about four times our share of the global commons, while Europe is consuming twice their share and many nations are living well below their fair share. We need to think more globally and understand that we can find ways to share and still maintain a livable lifestyle.

One such way is to stop wars altogether. Women have a special power to break this “patriotic” mindset. Wars destroy the planet with its wealth of resources, and the human infrastructure necessary for life. Wars do remove people from the planet in large enough numbers to make sharing easier, but they rarely result in anything other than gluttony and hoarding—which, of course, leads to more wars over scarce resources. This is stupid and not in any way “patriotic”!

MARYSIA: Yes..women can call on the power it takes to bear and nurse life to resist violence against their own children--starting in the womb, but not stopping there. And women need and deserve our collective help in resisting violence before and after birth...Now there's a positive reframing of "patriotic duty"! The whole mentality of "Don't have an abortion; we need your cannon fodder” is really one of disrespect for life at all stages.

ROSALIE: I agree, and believe that women must stop glorifying war and giving their sons and daughters to this war machine!

MARYSIA: And there is much anyone, anywhere can do…for instance…

ROSALIE: One can give time to learning about conflict resolution, conscientious objection to war, nonviolent protests, and what is called active nonviolence. It is difficult and countercultural but necessary to save our human race, our living environment, and our planet home.

People can put their own skills, knowledge, and opportunities together to make a difference for life. In this way, life will find a way to survive. She has always done this in surprising ways!

MARYSIA: We can only hope your prayer will be answered. Thank you very much.

If you want to learn more, there are many books by or about Rosalie Bertell. They include Dr. Mary-Louise Engel’s print biography Rosalie Bertell: Scientist, Eco-Feminist, Visionary from the Women’s Press “Women Who Rock” series.

Another Way to Grow One's Own Food Security

2008-06-03T13:29:00.004-05:00

The global crisis in food costs is hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest. Fortunately, there are many eco-friendly, high-yield gardening and farming methods now that can help people, including pregnant and nursing mothers, take their own nutrition and their own food security into their own hands. These methods can be adapted to a wide variety of climates.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory covers some of these methods in our section on Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Food & Nutrition: Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating.

In the tiny Southern African nation of Lesotho, "keyhole gardens" are catching on. Residents of the arid highlands cannot afford imported food, yet local conditions make farming very difficult.

Keyhole gardens are a blessing because they yield large amounts of nutrient-rich vegetables. And because they are in raised beds, people who are pregnant, sick, or elderly can easily tend to them. This is very important in Lesotho; it has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS, and many grandparents are raising their grandchildren.

To learn more about keyhole gardening, please check out:

--This BBC World Service Report (mostly text).

--This video from Send a Cow:

http://www.graspr.com/videos/Making-a-Keyhole-Garden

We're Not the Only Pro Contraceptive Prolifers

2008-06-01T18:49:00.004-05:00

Turn the Clock Forward rounds up a Pro Contraception, Pro Life blogswarm.

LAMom's contributions link to that poll we all like a lot, the one showing that 80% of US prolifers are prochoice on contraception. There are many others like us, and probably more in other nations.

In short: we're not alone.
And this: kindly please do not dismiss us.

responses from sluts4choice

2008-06-01T16:08:00.002-05:00

...can be found in the comments here.

We Are Prolife and Pro-Contraception

2008-05-27T13:02:00.008-05:00

Turn the Clock Forward is calling for a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm on May 31. Since I probably won't have much computer access on that day, I will chime in early.

I want to underscore the many ways that the Nonviolent Choice Directory helps to secure and protect the human rights to freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention and to strong social support for all voluntary prevention options. Contraception, of course, is included under these rights, as are rape and incest prevention and treatment, abstinence, fertility awareness/natural family planning, outercourse, and same-sex relations.

Nonviolent Choice:

Offers global resources on Sexual/Reproductive Health Education of the comprehensive (contraception-inclusive, as opposed to abstinence-only) variety and all of the above methods of Pregnancy Prevention, most surely and at great length including contraception--including "male methods," consonant with our focus on Male Responsibility as a means of reducing abortion.

With Turn the Clock Forward, cosponsors Pro Every Life, Pro Nonviolent Choice, Pro Reproductive Justice for All: A Manifesto, which endorses freedom of choice in and social support for pregnancy prevention methods--and how can that not include contraception?!
Sells nonprescription family planning and safer sex items through our website.

Regularly features action alerts that defend voluntary contraception (see the lefthand sidebar of this blog, "Current Action Alerts").

Archives my debate/dialogue with an anti-contraception, anti-abortion visitor. This may be helpful to other pro-contraceptive prolifers engaged in similar debates/dialogues, especially the scientific references on whether hormonal contraceptives are abortifacient and whether contraception reduces abortion.

If you are both prolife and pro-contraception, Nonviolent Choice shows that you have company, and that there are opportunities for political and civic engagement that express your beliefs!

more on sluts4choice

2008-05-27T12:15:00.002-05:00

So far, no one from this group has responded to my explanation of what the manifesto is about from the vantage point of its authors/sponsors, nor my invitation to dialogue.

Accusations from sluts4choice

2008-05-26T11:58:00.006-05:00

The LiveJournal group sluts4choice have levelled a number of charges against the manifesto Pro Every Life, Pro Nonviolent Choice, Pro Reproductive Justice for All and its authors/sponsors, Turn the Clock Forward and the Nonviolent Choice Directory. Examples:

we hate women, especially women who seek sexual pleasure;
we believe women are stupid and incapable of conducting their own lives;
we believe in mandatory motherhood;
we destructively romanticize childbirth and motherhood;
we oppose contraception.

None of this is stated or even insinuated in the manifesto itself--quite the opposite. And none of this explains why, for example, the Nonviolent Choice Directory:

Advocates for comprehensive sex education and contraception, outercourse & oral sex, & LGBT sexuality as well as abstinence and fertility awareness/natural family planning methods. See also this blog's sidebar for current action alerts on these matters.
Sells nonprescription family planning and safer sex items through the website.
Has a page on Other Ways to Give Life that covers childfree/childless/nonparental lifestyles and supports the right to pursue them.
Lists a number of resources about a wide range of serious real-life problems that face mothers before, during, and after birth, including global maternal mortality, postpartum depression, and poverty. If we romanticized childbirth and motherhood, we would have no idea of what these problems are and what resources could possibly address them.

sluts4choice are reiterating dogmatic, by-definition stereotypes against anyone who opposes abortion. More importantly, they are cutting off all possibility of cooperative action on those large areas of reproductive justice where genuine agreement exists. There is so much work to be done, and these stereotypes really get in the way.

The group complains profusely about prolifers who do not support abortion-reducing measures. Although sluts4choice do not make it in a particularly respectful, constructive fashion--that's a fair challenge. Prolife does have to be during and after as well as before birth, or what good is it?

Yet what is their response to prolifers who *do* support abortion-reducing measures, and avidly, comprehensively so? Why, we can't possibly be for real!

Sigh.

ps I know that some feminists are trying to reclaim the word "slut" as a way to overcome its bigotry-enforcing history, and in fact I heartily endorse the goal of destigmatizing and affirming women's right to seek and enjoy sexual pleasure. But for some reason feminists calling themselves "sluts" sounds to me like the young African Americans in my neighborhood who refer to themselves and one another by the n-word--not particularly self-respecting, and wasn't the NAACP onto something when it gave said term a funeral?

Stop Harassment of LGBT Youth

2008-05-25T19:18:00.004-05:00

A Memphis, Tennessee high school principal has taken punitive, privacy-invading measures against LGBT students. Please join with Advocates for Youth to protest the harassment.

Among the many dire results of hostility towards LGBT youth: risky, unprotected experimentation with heterosexual sex that may result in undesired pregnancies and abortions.

Homophobia, biphobia, & transphobia are the opposite of prolife!

Abortion No, Contraception Yes: Speak Up May 31

2008-05-18T16:17:00.004-05:00

Are you one of the majority of prolifers (80 plus percent in the US) who advocate voluntary contraception and freedom of conscience in pregnancy prevention?

Turn the Clock Forward is instigating a prolife, pro-contraception blogswarm.

Please participate!

A CPC Director In Her Own Words

2008-04-24T19:14:00.007-05:00

Prolife CPCs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers) often face sharp, unmitigated criticism from prochoicers that they have no public chance to answer or explain who they are and what they do on their own terms.

Nonviolent Choice does not necessarily agree with every aspect of every CPC. Among other differences, we are a secular/nonsectarian/interfaith initiative, and many CPCs are run by Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant concerns. But we do recognize that many CPCs actually do make positive differences in the lives of women and children.

Nonviolent Choice talked with Angie Weszely, president of Chicago's Caris Pregnancy Clinics since May 2006. She joined Caris as development director in 2005. She has 11 years experience working with nonprofits, including a year outside the US, as well as a background in corporate training and sales.

As a mother in the paid workforce, Angie empathizes with women who struggle to both rear children and work their jobs, especially if they are single mothers. She brings this consciousnsess into her work with women facing difficult pregnancies.

MARYSIA: Please explain what Caris does.

ANGIE: Caris is a faith-based, nonprofit organization providing hope and support to womenf acing unplanned pregnancies. We have three program areas: Prevention, Intervention, and Connection.

Prevention involves reducing unplanned pregnancies through abstinence education and support groups. Intervention involves providing abortion alternatives to women through free services at our three clinics. Connection involves networking women to support and resources in the community – through social agencies, churches and individuals.

MARYSIA: Just to clarify, the particular faith basis of Caris is evangelical Christian. And today as well as historically, many evangelical Christians support women's rights. Although as with most groups of humans, there are others who still have a lot to learn and a long way to go, to say the least!

Now, CPC workers are widely stereotyped as hostile to the interests and wellbeing of women. Yet you not only object to that stereotype--you define yourself as a feminist. How did you arrive at your feminism?

ANGIE: Because “feminism” can be so controversial and is defined differently by many people, I define myself as a feminist only when I can clarify the definition.

I believe that women should be respected and accepted as women, and I believe in equality and nonviolence for all people. I don’t align with any strain of feminism that endorses the marginalization of any groups of people (unborn children, for example), legitimizes tasteless expression of sexuality, or would ask women to act like men.

For me, it was a gradual journey to feminism. I think it came from being shut out of opportunities because I was a woman, and realizing that all isn’t as equal as we would like to think it is.

I also became increasingly aware of and sensitive to the exploitation of women through pornography, sexual abuse, and abortion. Then when I had a daughter, I had an increasing desire to fight for a world where she would be protected, not asked to grow up too soon, and able to achieve her potential and dreams as a woman.

MARYSIA: How do your values and concerns as a feminist motivate and relate to your work as a CPC director?

ANGIE: At Caris, we hear women all the time say things like: “I don’t want to have an abortion, but I have to. I have no resources or support – I have no other choice.” How is that congruent with feminism?

If we aren’t offering women with unplanned pregnancies the emotional support and practical resources they need but instead offer them abortion as their only option, they really don’t have much of a choice. I believe that women don’t like abortion and don’t want to be in a place where they feel they have to make that choice.

So why settle for it? Why not work to build a society where women have access to everything they need to continue their pregnancy? To me, that is a feminist vision for the world.

MARYSIA: What do you feel feminism has to offer the CPC movement as a whole?

ANGIE: I think CPCs are doing a work that is very empowering to women, and that should continue to be our focus. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be associated with other prolife efforts that can sometimes be insensitive to the pressures a pregnant woman can face.

At Caris, we advocate a “third voice” in the abortion debate – one that takes into account the best interest of the woman and the child.

MARYSIA: What stereotypes about CPCs concern you the most? If you had a chance to sit down and actually talk with prochoicers who level these criticisms, what would you say to them?

ANGIE: I’m concerned when I read articles describing CPCs as “fake clinics” out to deceive and manipulate women. It is my passion for women that drives me to provide them with real options other than abortion.

I would like the pro-choice community to acknowledge that not every choice for abortion is made from a place of also having access to other options. We exist for the women who don’t really want to have an abortion, but feel pressured to make that choice because of outside factors.

Many women tell us the father of the baby or their parents don’t support them continuing the pregnancy, or they don’t feel they have the practical resources for a child. Women in these situations aren’t really able to exercise a free choice without centers like Caris informing them and connecting them to all the support and resources that are available to them. What pro-choice advocate wouldn’t want women having real choices?

MARYSIA: Thank you, Angie.

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Nonviolent Choices for All Our Lives

Please Try Our Directory Again

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Our Maternal Care Plea in UNFPA Blog

Want to Affirm *All* Our Lives?

Help Christine Taylor

Black Genocide?

UNFPA, That Rampant Killer

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What Our Readers Probably Have to Say Already About This Man

What Prolife Means

RHRealityCheck.org: My Posts in the Common Ground Section

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Progressive Prolife Thinking?

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When "Moral Purity" Is Valued Over Helping Women & Children

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An Open Letter to the Prolife Movement, from a Prolifer

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LGBT Phobia Leads to Crisis Pregnancy and Abortion

Tell the National Organization for Women (US) What A Feminist Agenda Needs to Be

From the Annals of What's Wrong With This Picture?

Revisiting Some Poetry Against the Iraq War; A Contradiction That Catches at Me

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Nonviolent Choice Shares Its Vision With Change.gov

But Wait, There's More

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Want to Volunteer for Nonviolent Choice?

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Major Update to Our Directory

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Trying to Address the Charge of Prolife Hypocrisy

Tips for Contraceptive Success: A Reprise

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent IUD Failure

Tips for Contraceptive Success: Medications and Inhibitors that Lower Hormonal Contraception Effectiveness

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent Oral Contraceptive Failure

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How To Decrease Failure with the Fertility Awareness Method

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How to Prevent Diaphragm Failure

Tips for Contraceptive Success: How To Respond to Men's Excuses for Not Wanting to Wear a Condom

Want to Affirm All Our Lives?

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