Choice Words

So this article was emailed to me a few hours ago and while reading it, I felt like I was in a….trance for some reason. Kind of like the ones you get when someone is talking to you a lot about something stupid and irrelevant, and you think that they just have no friends at all.

Now we all know that pro-life people are against abortion and contraceptives and blah blah blah. But breastfeeding?

Breast-feeding, like oral contraception, alters a woman’s hormonal balance, thereby suppressing ovulation, fertilization, and, theoretically, implantation. These results were documented in a 1992 research paper, “Relative Contributions of Anovulation and Luteal Phase Defect to the Reduced Pregnancy Rate of Breastfeeding Women.” The authors concluded: “The abnormal endocrine profile of the first luteal phase offers effective protection to women who ovulate during lactational amenorrhea within the first 6 months after delivery.” In other words, breast-feeding prevents pregnancy despite ovulation.

Unfortunately for this guy, I know all this medical lingo and read the summary of this research paper he spoke of. The article says that breast-feeding did NOT prevent pregnancy, but rather it lowers the chances of conception significantly during the first six months postpartum, but not to the extent of prevention. He should have read thoroughly and not just read the title.

Yet, not only was he against breastfeeding, but also against drinking of caffeine and exercise in women of childbearing age. Shit, do you know how much I love Pepsi and volleyball? And I must give it up just because I’m of childbearing age? So not only is this guy pro-life, but he’s also pro-a-lot-of-fucking-kids.

And I end this blog with a very big LOL. I won’t need to get my tubes tied after my first child after all.

Here’s a tip for all of you ugly girls out there! [Please note - I use the word “ugly” in the most ridiculous, sarcastic, wtf is going on here sense] Ready?

Move to Mount Isa, Australia!

Well, that’s what their mayor wants you to do, anyway. Seeing as men outnumber women 5-1, Mayor John Molony thought he would suggest that “beauty-disadvantaged” women move to Mount Isa, cause, you know, all women want is to snag a man.

This quote would be pure amusement, if he wasn’t seriously treating women like commodities for the poor little men in his town to screw:

Quite often you will see walking down the street a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face. Whether it is recollection of something previous or anticipation for the next evening, there is a degree of happiness,” Molony told the Townsville Bulletin newspaper last week.

Obviously it’s because these women are in relationships with men, not because they’re happy with themselves and their lives. What do I have to smile about, then? I’m single. Eesh. I probably just look demented, walking down the street, being happy for no good reason!

But, thankfully we’ve got Mayor Molony to look out for us women. He says he’s a “bloke who respects women.”

Oh. Well, Mr. Molony, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.

Anyone remember former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s infamous comment?

Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our work-force. It might be because for the last 35 years we have aborted more than a million people each year who would have been in out workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

Now if many of you don’t know, the Christian Right is very anti-immigrant, but very pro-nativist. The Christian Right is against abortion or anything that has to do with the wonders of sex. Yet when it comes to immigrant’s reproductive rights, abortion and contraception is a-okay. Why? They believe that an immigrant’s sole purpose of coming to America is to have “anchor babies”, which is protected under the 14th amendment.

According to this article, published by the Public Eye:

If anything could discourage the Christian Right from lending support to the anti-immigrant movement, it might be that many of its most prominent organizations were created to advance a population control agenda including sterilization and abortion for immigrants of color.

Please note the “immigrants of color” part. So not only are they being nativist but also racist, as in the case of Jiang Zhen Xing. And unfortunately for these Christian Right nativist, whites will be the minorities by the year 2042.

I think that it is very hypocritical for these people to talk about how we should return to the belief that this country was founded on Christian beliefs, but we were also founded relying on immigration. Last time I was in US History, Christopher Columbus came all the way from the other side of the planet and we also enslaved many West Africans and brought them to the Americas.

I have a Google News Alert set up for the word “transgender“. Usually I get four or five articles emailed to me a day. Last week that number ballooned to twenty plus. The reason? The news that Isis, who is publicly self-identifying as transgender, will be competing in the next cycle of America’s Next Top Model.

My initial reaction was cautious optimism. As I mentioned in a previous blog, we need widespread acceptance of transgender people as, ya know, people. Having a trans woman on a popular reality show, showing that she’s actually not some scary crazy freak who will make bathrooms dangerous and destroy the world, seems like a positive step.

Of course, Fox News has already gone and been their usual ignorant selves. This is where the caution comes in. Yes, I hope increased visibility will lead to increased acceptance, but do we really have to deal with this stupidity and hatred on the way there?

Lennea Carty is a graduate student at University of Indiana Bloomington.

The doctor’s office waiting room. A place of fun: relaxing water fountains, frolicking toddlers, and lots of adorable elderly couples. But the amusement park ride ends when the nurse takes you on the tramway to the doctor’s office and leaves you there alone–sans people to observe–for so long that you begin to wonder if you’re in that Tom Hanks movie “Castaway.” Normally, I would spend those sluggish minutes fiddling around with the instruments, hitting my knees with the little rubber hammer or trying to take my own blood pressure… but a stack of pamphlets hanging on the wall caught my eye.

Erectile disfunction? Nope! Bunions? Not so much. The flu shot? Not until October.

But wait! What’s this? The BEST form of birth control?! So claimed the sticker on display case. Having spent hours of undergraduate classes studying the legality of birth control in American history, and personally being a fan of women’s rights, I decided to take a peek.

And then…
I found…

Lies.
Damn lies.
And damn, lying statistics.

About Natural Family Planning (NFP).

Reason #1, this pamphlet boasts, that YOU should use natural family planning? “It works!” Except it doesn’t. According to Stanford University ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHPRC/ch6_nat.html ), typical use of this method has a yearly failure rate of 25%. That means that ONE IN FOUR women who use NFP will be pregnant within a year. But the authors of this piece neglect to tell you that.

Reason #7 says that NFP is inexpensive… “very inexpensive,” when compared to the “hundreds of dollars per year” that you may spend on birth control pills. But wait… NFP has a 25% failure rate. How much does an abortion cost? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that birth control pills are a hell of a lot cheaper. And certainly the pill is cheaper than HAVING A CHILD! WTF, mate?

I could continue to illustrate the logical fallacies, blatant LIES, and religious propaganda disguised as medical advice contained in this pamphlet. I could expound upon my (now former) doctor’s religion interfering with her medical duties, and how many ethical lines she crossed. I could even hypothesize that she is negligent, if not malicious, for providing such deceitful materials without any prefacing statement that highlights the religious nature of NFP and detailed, impartial statistics about its success rate.

But instead, I’ll let you read the brochure for yourself.
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Students from Riverside High School in North Carolina are not only abstaining from sex, but from gym and chemistry too!

Read this article on the second page by student Alex Lew.

I perform with a group dedicated to “spreading the word, not the virus” called Posi+ive Change. We have a variety of skits, dances, songs, and plays about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. An infusion of the arts and education gives you the opportunity to laugh, cry, and think about those hard-hitting issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Posi+ive Change is not a group just siting facts and numbers, we share stories, personal stories, and thus you are not the same once you leave our presence.

Some Titles of Our Work:
“For All We Know” - dance piece
“I Am But a Canvas” - a monologue in three segments, capturing different phases/cases of HIV
“Smoke” - transgender queer story
“The Meeting” - a discussion with men (gay, straight, queer, and transgender) about sex and being HIV positive
“Many Rivers to Cross” - dance piece
“I Choose Life” - a song
“Who’s Living With Who” - acceptance and struggles of living with HIV
scenes from Cheryl West’s “Before It Hits Home”

Be Enlightened, Be Engaged, Be Encouraged….For more information, please email Artistic Director William Ridley, william_ridley@yahoo.com

This is a little old but still hilarious. The video speaks for itself.

Happy Almost-Friday!

It’s taken me a while to blog about the murder of Angie Zapata because of how shaken I am. A warning: this post will be triggering, in many ways.

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A friend passed this article along to me, and the headline is comical and the findings are pretty much obvious. Duh.