abortion

Yes, it’s come to this

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

As reported last night by Rachel Maddow (see video below), at the urging of an anti-abortion religious group, the School Board in Gilbert, Arizona, is tearing out pages from a high school honors biology book. It is the first action taken after a law in Arizona passed two years ago that requires all textbooks “to present childbirth and abstinence as preferred options to elective abortion.”

The offending page, which simply discusses that abortion exists as a factual matter, something that is rightly part of the national curriculum for all Advanced Placement and other students hoping to enter college equipped with a complete education and able to compete on a level playing field.

Cutting out this page, retracting information previously available to students, is stupid and exceedingly counter-intuitive (see map below), whether in a biology textbook or in the context of sex education.

In this case, Rachel Maddow comes to the rescue by securing the domain, ArizonaHonorsBiology.com, to make this page available in perpetuity. But what about the next time and the next time after that?

This is similar to what we are witnessing in the state of Texas, where access to sex education is severely limited, and where social studies and history textbooks are being censored or in some cases rewritten to falsify facts (such as wiping out all mention of slavery, that it ever existed).

What will be next? Tearing out pages that mention homosexuality? marriage or cohabitation without children? the achievements of people of color? The answer is: Yes, more page-tearing and book-burning is in our nation’s future if we don’t start paying more attention to elections, starting at the local level.

We bring attention to this especially because it demonstrates the horrible repercussions of the theocratic fundamentalism now permeating American politics and law, retarding our progression towards a fair and just society.

These are not the first or only examples of censorship within our schools, and we are poised to see more of this retrograde behavior wherever right-wing nuts can gain a foothold, from local school boards to congress and possibly the White House itself someday.

These founts of poor decision-making are operating out of fear. They don’t believe women should ever have control over their reproductive health or equality rights, and think they are “protecting children” when they are actually hobbling them.

Complete sex education is the only thing that actually protects teenagers.

Center for Disease Control, 2012

Center for Disease Control, 2012

Free access to complete sex education is a human right. To withhold it is blatant child abuse when you consider the actual facts and repercussions.

Research proves that these programs are entirely ineffective. As a matter of fact, unwanted pregnancies and STDs including HIV are more prevalent in areas in the country that limit all sex education to abstinence-only programs. So these misguided lawmakers are not just wrong in purpose but wrong in deed.

Please go the polls on Tuesday (and every Election Day) and vote these people into the dustbin of stupid history.

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More on sex education here.

 

Express Your Dissent!

It is unbelievable that in 2014
we are still fighting about women’s
access to basic health care like birth control.

If you agree — say so. Just click here now
to add your name to the dissent.
— Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood

Photo by James Palinsad Flickr/creative commons

Photo by James Palinsad
Flickr/creative commons

In a dramatic 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court today chose to side with corporations over people and set a brand new (and untested) precedent that is just the starting gun for more and more corporations claiming religious freedom superiority over the needs of their employees.

(See a LATE BREAKING UPDATE at the bottom showing the already cascading effect this decision is having in the lower courts, in less than 8 hours.) 

In Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the right-wing justices vacated a portion of the Affordable Care Act that applies to certain for-profit corporations, giving them superior religious freedom rights. They performed this bit of surgery with a dull hack saw. In the the process they perpetuated a fatal misunderstanding of the difference between pregnancy prevention and abortion.

Protecting the free-exercise rights of closely held corporations thus protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control them. — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

It was a good day to be a boss. And a very good day for all the lawyers who will now thrive because of the havoc this decision will fuel. 

Justice Stephen Breyer and the 3 women Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayer, and Elana Kagan, dissented in consideration of the tens of thousands of working women who are now unable to exercise their religious freedom, or more bluntly, freedom from the religious freedom of others with whom they disagree. Ginsburg called it, “A decision of startling breadth,” and went on to say . . .

The Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood . . . invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith . . . The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield . . .

The longstanding, extreme right-wingnuts’ campaign to dismantle any gains in reproductive freedom is driven solely by their theocratic fundamentalist beliefs that dictate that women shouldn’t control their own bodies, or shouldn’t be wanting to have sex in the first place, and that pregnancy prevention amounts to another form of abortion. Their position is that discrimination against women health care is not discrimination at all — it’s okay for your bosses to know better what you need.

Now it’s up to the Congress to provide a contraceptive work-around, if possible. For now, however, working women have to pay twice, first by their labor which entitles them to health care, and then separately outside of their company’s health care program. For example, a working woman now must pay more than $1000 for a IUD, an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy, in many cases equal to a month’s pay.

There is an irony here because less available contraception will result in more pregnancies which are even more expensive and more of a strain on women’s overall health and their economic opportunities.

This impasse is a perfect example of an inhumane and coercive system that must be replaced with a humane and voluntary association outside of the influence of governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies. Shall birth control, including abortion, be a matter for the growing theocracy or be a matter between a woman and her health care providers? See A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom to understand why VenusPlusX believes issues like these are of supreme importance.

Join us and Planned Parenthood in expressing your dissent so together we can do everything possible to protect and defend women’s health and rights nationwide.

Related . . .

— A possible (very slim) silver lining in today’s ruling

— Some equally bad decisions this session:  McCullen v Coakley, stripping buffer zones at women’s clinics; and, today’s weakening of unions, and the worker benefits they sponsor with Harris v Quinn

— Two very good decisions: Protecting personal privacy in Riley v California Rulingand denying cert rejecting challenge to California’s law banning gay sex therapy.

— When Will We Move to Impeach Certain Supreme Court Justices, Part 1 and Part 2

— When Free Speech Becomes Sedition

— How Right-wing Nuts are Actually Helping Progressives

UPDATE from SCOTUSblogActing swiftly in the wake of the Court’s ruling on Monday, and relying directly upon that decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday blocked all enforcement of the mandate against an Alabama Catholic TV network, a non-profit entity. Dozens of cases similar to Hobby Lobby are in the pipeline and now sure to be viewed with more favor.

 

 

 

Supreme Women Don’t Fail Us Now (again)

It was painful last week to hear the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in McCullen v Coakley, siding with abortion protesters’ free speech right to engage women face-to face in the public square and against those advocating for clinics’ privacy and public safety in consideration of the violence, bombings, and cold-blooded murder that beset them long before there was anything akin to a buffer zone. The case ended the a 35-foot buffer zone in Massachusetts, didn’t rule on a handful of other states that had smaller buffer zones, and, the reasoning of each justice varied wildly.

Photo by Paul Weaver Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Paul Weaver
Flickr/creative commons

Abortion has been legal in this country for 40 years (Roe v Wade , 1973), but discrimination against women has been rising at a fast pace due to the machinations of the explosive theocratic fundamentalist’s discrimination politics that are strangling government, and, it seems, the once-hallowed Supreme Court. Because it would be impossible to reverse Roe v Wade in the courts, the Court is giving these abortion protesters free reign to take it out on women they don’t know.

Why can the Supreme Court itself establish such a wide, no-free-speech buffer around its building (hundreds of square feet, for “decorum and public safety”), and Westboro Baptist Church haters now cannot cross a large buffer zone surrounding veterans funerals, but abortion clinics’ bombs, maiming, and death somehow are not worthy?

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick puts it this way . .

While the decision is not monumentally awful in ways some progressives most feared, and certainly affords the state substantial latitude in its future attempts to protect women seeking abortions from harassment, more than anything it seems to reflect a continued pattern of “free speech for me but not for thee” or, at least, “free speech for people who think like me,” that pervades recent First Amendment decisions at the court. . .

. . . Right now, the commentary is pretty predictably split between those who believe that the rights of “peaceful sidewalk counselors” were vindicated, and those who believe those counselors are actually pro-life bullies. The court opts for the gentle counseling characterization, without acknowledging that it was the extreme conduct of the latter group that led to passage of the law, and that, realistically, in the absence of the buffer zone, both types of protesters will be greatly emboldened. I guess from here on in, you won’t know whether you are being intimidated or “gently counseled” until after it’s happened.

This is outright discrimination politics interfering with what should have been a privacy and public safety issue. These are not sweet grandmas trying to talk gently to urge women not to go through with the abortion, these are hellions bent on intimidation based solely on their own personal view of abortion although abortion is something that is entirely legal in this country.

Andrew Gouveia wrote a heart-wrenching op-ed last week in Time magazine, and other horror stories are making the rounds as most women stand in shock that there was no dissent, even from our fellow women on the Court. What were they thinking? I guess we’ll have to wait for their memoirs.

It may be fanciful to think these same women Justices have struck a deal to create a majority tomorrow, Monday, in rejecting Hobby Lobby’s efforts to make corporations exempt from providing health insurance that covers contraceptives (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby) just like some religious entities right now. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers must cover free contraception for women in employee health plans. It is possible, the Court may rule to restrict the exemption to only tightly held private corporations but this would still create a very slippery slope, and set a bad precedent for women’s rights. In their March deliberations, the Justices themselves wondered out loud whether this exemption would let these same companies to disallow coverage for other things such as blood transfusion because their religious beliefs disallow them. And what about protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees?

The possibility of a deal in the works to protect reproductive health for women, might make sense for a court already smeared by some of their bad decisions. It is just a strand of hope against the possibility of another savage and bloody run against human rights.

I’m going to sleep tonight with that strand of hope still alive, that this Supreme Court, especially the women Justices, will find its way to stand up for the law, in this case the Affordable Care Act’s provisions, and the rights of women to control their own health.

However, we have to ask again, what are they thinking?

For more on what’s at stake tomorrow, click here.

Also see: When Will We Move to Impeach Certain Supreme Court Justices, Part 1 and Part 2

And, if you are curious as to why VenusPlusX thinks this is important, read A Manifesto for The New Age of Sexual Freedom, and catch our unique mix of posts and videos 24/7 that will get us all to that better future we deserve, sooner rather than later.

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: Shockingly Old Fashioned

(También en Español)

In today’s video, we meet several young women at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC who have strong feelings about owning vibrators, judgmental people, religious institutions, and shockingly old fashioned ideas.

What’s your opinion? Can one ever really own too many vibrators? Should marriage be denied to people because of their sexual orientation? And when’s the last time you shoved someone into a room and said “hey, come on, jump in bed with us”?

Send us your video at columbia@venusplusx.org — we want to hear from you!

Video by Tiye Massey.

TRANSCRIPT

VenusPlusX: …In the state of Arkansas, one is only legally permitted to own five vibrators.
Woman 1: Really? It’s bullshit. So…
Woman 2: Yeah I think it’s bullshit too.
[cut]
Woman 3: Who the hell are you to be telling me what I should be doing with my body and my life?
[cut]
Woman 1: There are plenty of non-religious people who are also just… really judgmental.
Woman 2: It’s kind of like the marriage thing; why is it between a man and a woman? You know, it’s like a Christian institution that’s built into our society but it’s supposed to be separate. So like, laws that are supposed to “help” us or whatever, really just tell us what they don’t want us to do.
[cut]
Woman 4: I do find it really shocking that people are against abortion, for example. It feels like you go back in time… It’s just shockingly, shockingly old-fashioned and shockingly short-sighted and it seems very repressive of women to be honest. … It’s not like you’re shoving anyone into a room and going ‘Hey, come on, jump in bed with us!’ Like it’s whatever, you’re just saying what you want!”

Arizona bill declares women pregnant two weeks before conception

(También en Español)

News of Note: Arizona bill declares women pregnant two weeks before conception

A new bill up for vote in the state of Arizona would ban abortions for some expectant mothers, but that’s only the start of what lawmakers have in store. If the legislation passes, the state will consider a child to exist even before conception.

Under Arizona’s H.B. 2036, the state would recognize the start of the unborn child’s life to be the first day of its mother’s last menstrual period. The legislation is being proposed so that lawmakers can outlaw abortions on fetuses past the age of 20-weeks, but the verbiage its authors use to construct a time cycle for the baby would mean that the start of the child’s life could very well occur up to two weeks before the mother and father even ponder procreating.

On page eight of the proposed amendment to H.B. 2036, lawmakers lay out the “gestational age” of the child to be “calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman,” and from there, outlaws abortion “if the probable gestational age of [the] unborn child has been determined to be at least twenty weeks.”

Conception before a couple even decides to have sex? You can’t declare something has happened before it has happened, much less make that into a law.

I’m getting really tired of seeing these religiously founded ideologies masquerading as unbiased ethical issues. If you think an embryo, zygote, or fetus should have the same rights as yourself, whatever your rationale, it’s subjective and should have absolutely no place in the law books. Punishing non-religious women because you believe their embryos have souls is unfair, unfounded, and intrusive. When are we going to pass some laws that identify and prevent religiously motivated legislature from even making it this far?

Creative Commons image by: Craig Larsen

Op-Ed: . .Tis The Season of Love . . . and Not-of Love

También En Español.


Which will you choose for 2012? Will you commit yourself to the power and supremacy of love? Will you check yourself to make sure your actions are “of love?” Are you willing to call out those who are not-of love?

The stark realities and compounding errors of the feckless conspiracy of the greedy and the stupid are in sharp relief. These realities become clearer, bolder, and more desperate by the hour, with no exit strategy that doesn’t involve even greater hardship to the rest of us who own this earth. Who are the humane and the inhumane? Who are those “of love” and who are those “not-of love?” It’s easy to spot each camp. People cannot help showing which side they are on by the commitments and actions of their everyday life.

Our task is to co-create a world free from the bondage of a few. The few, let’s call them an aged, economically privileged, mostly entirely white, and corrupt. They are a small group, roughly .005% of the world’s population. They are characterized by their own polarizing fear of anything “other,” and naturally devolve to attacks at the intersection of race and sexuality because these two things so obviously threaten their ragged, useless paradigm that has brought nothing but social and economic injustice to the entire planet.

These folks are the ones in need of serious re-education. Movements such as Occupy Everything is doing a sterling service by pointing out this dislocation of world resources and the income disparities that are dismantling otherwise benign and serviceable institutions. For the first time in history enough people are mobilized throughout the world to flip that script once and for all, while the insane inanity of the now lock-step radical right, led by a new and rather freaky breed of (irreligious) American fundamentalists, is doing its part to speed along the process of their eventual demise.

Start with governments, “the state.” Governments are instruments of the people, and have an important role in maximizing the efficient uses of our collective resources, and in guaranteeing education and equalizing opportunity. An ideal government would have as its motto, “Privilege For All,” and carry on policy, programming, and administration to make that possible. Gone will be the most coercive arm of the state, the military, an end to the horrible choice given young people, unemployment or lack of tuition versus enlisting to fill body bags of endless asymmetrical wars aimed at justifying huge government budgets. That’s wrong, obscene.

Why must the state interfere with our reproductive rights? A private relationship between a patient and her physician is a precise example of the type of voluntary association that replaces its current coercive system that leads to nothing but heartache and more social and economic dislocation.

Why can’t teenagers have access to birth control? Condoms are more widely accessible, but why are teenage girls prevented from getting the morning after pill if they choose? The American fundamentalists driving governments insist that this is killing a . . . a what? a zygote?

“Personhood” proselytizers would have you believe that life begins at the moment of conception, when (the) sperm fertilizes (the) egg, and anything or more correctly, anyone, interfering with that “life” is guilty of a poorly thought through illegality. But they haven’t thought this through at all. The personhood laws would make every female guilty of infanticide every month because menstruation discharges those “eggs” that failed to attach. Shall we look all women up for their pre-existing condition that calls them monthly murderers? It make no sense and laws like these perforce are destined to the gooey dustbin of failed attempts to control people’s destiny.

These are just a few headline examples demonstrating how easy it is to separate out the haters among us. With the upcoming election, as crazy laws make their way through right wing controlled state legislatures, as mean-spirited Republican candidates spread their vitriol, it should be easier and easier for us to isolate and eradicate the draconians among us.

We have to have courage and call them out at every turn, and women are leading the way. Everyone, including men, comprising our 99.095% must join in to bring about a season “of love.”