Choice Words

Henry Hyde, avid abortion opponent, died Thursday in his home. Hyde is notorious for his 1976 amendment which restricted access to public funding for abortions. Our Southwest Partnership collaborator Latina Institute (NLIRH) has a great outline of his history as an adversary of abortion.

Hyde was recently given the Presidential Medal of Honor. I mean this is a man who encouraged under-funding resources for low income women, military women, Native Americans, federal employees, and Peace Corps volunteers. And as the NLIRH says so eloquently,

Now, more than ever, we must struggle to repeal the Hyde Amendment so that his “achievements” do not become a legacy.

Please go and sign the petition to repeal the Hyde Amendment today.

The Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill will change how sperm and egg donations are conducted in Wales. This bill would allow families to decide on the background of the donor and would mandate that donors register. So years down the road if the resulting offspring decides to find their biological contributer all doors are open for them… I would think that would deter a lot of donors from making that decision.

The crazy thing about this new legislation which is presently before the New South Wales Upper House is that it could potentially allow reproductive donors to decide WHO will recieve their sperm or eggs.

Gay rights groups and medical ethicists have warned that proposed New South Wales laws on reproductive donors are discriminatory. The New South Wales Government is planning to give sperm and egg donors the right to choose who will receive their genetic material.

The Donor Conception Support Group believes that it will benefit the “resulting children”. In other words, they believe that those children won’t be subjected to the “evil ways” of gays, single mothers, ethnic, and religious groups.

Read the report here.

Conflating overprotective fathers with Uncle Sam? Yes please! Brought to you by the always entertaining, often depressing Conservapedia, check out this article on virginity. Not even Lady Liberty herself can be trusted to run her own reproductive life.

Virginity is respected and valued in many societies, especially female virginity, which is often interwoven with personal or family honor in some cultures. Some men place importance on a woman’s virginity, especially in a prospective wife.

Bonus points: they actually do explicitly acknowledge the importance of female over male virginity. Puke.

…Real Issues and Real Answers.

A new book titled “Body Drama”, written by former Miss Virginia and Harvard graduate Nancy Redd, comes out on December 27.

The book is meant to answer the awkward questions many young women have when it comes to puberty and all those fun things that happen in the teenage years.

Why do I sweat so much? Why is one breast bigger than the other? My vagina smells — what’s going on?

The book also includes real photographs of women’s bodies and health advice. Redd asks in the introduction, “How can we respect and protect our bodies if we don’t know what real bodies look like? If we can hardly utter the word vagina, much less peek at it without feeling dirty, how can we own and love it and ourselves?”

I think this is awesome and I’d like to see what the book is like once it comes out. And of course I have to be proud that it’s done by a fellow Virginia girl!

Heather Darling, Development Associate, is an island native with a sunny disposition. As Development Associate, Heather melds her love for money (she was a Finance major) with her desire to create a world where real reproductive choices exist. Her activism, though, is not limited to reproductive. In her spare time, Heather leads a quiet rebellion to bring back real hip-hop – no easy feat. Learn more about Heather here and check out her first post below.

So Friday officially kicked off the holiday season (even though I swear I saw Christmas decorations after Halloween and they changed the old-school rap channel to holiday music months ago). We all know what that means…shopping! Usually, that word rings glorious in my ears, but not during this time of year. After Thanksgiving, that word translates to crowded malls, long lines and parking lot battles.

But you’re smart. You know you can avoid all of those hassles by shopping for gifts online. But I think I can one up ya…there’s a way you can shop for gifts online while raising money for an organization you know and love. That’s right! During this holiday season, Choice USA is hosting Bid for Choice – an online auction – to raise money to support our ongoing work to decrease the cost of birth control on college campuses, educate young women around the issue of egg donation, and expose the harmful practices of crisis pregnancy centers.

What can be better? Not only are you getting cool gifts but you’re also supporting an organization that is near and dear to your heart. To quote my favorite rapper Jay-Z (even though after American Gangster, that “favorite” status is questionable) “To me…that’s a win/win”. And who doesn’t like to be a winner? So check out the auction and get your bid on!

P.S. I’m still peeved about the old-school rap channel! But hey, you have to pick your battles.

This fascinating article details the presence of abortion in both recent movies and those of the past.

The article takes a look at whether recent movies are dodging the abortion issue or actually making positive social commentary.

In reference to the summer hit Knocked Up :

A pair of twentysomethings get pregnant on a drunken one-night stand and decide to keep the baby. What so infuriated many was its omission of abortion - “the A-word”, as it was coyly referred to by the prospective father’s stoner housemates - as a serious option. Los Angeles-based sociologist Lisa Wade, posting on the prominent news site The Huffington Post, called the film “pro-life ideology disguised by dick jokes”. A Christian website called it “the family values comedy of the year” (albeit with caveats warning against racy language and use of soft drugs). Defending himself in New York last month, Apatow showed footage of a scene discussing abortion - played for laughs, of course - that didn’t make it into the cut, but will appear as an extra on the DVD.

And from the classic Dirty Dancing :

The original intention of another of the 80s’ surprise hits, Dirty Dancing, (as screenwriter and producer Eleanor Bergstein later explained) was to show a generation of girls who had grown up post-Roe what could happen without legal safeguards. She ended up playing down the backstreet-abortion storyline in her 1960s-set film to keep backers happy, but refused to buckle under pressure to edit it out.

Take a look at the article for more examples and different directors’ opinions on the way abortion is featured in his or her film.

Samuel Leonard, a zoology professor at Cornell died November 12th at 101 years old. By operating on animals, mainly rats, his research lead to advances in reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and the birth control pill.

Needless to say, without him, thousands of women wouldn’t be able to decide when and if they wanted to have children. Whether it be by controlling when they decide to have children with estrogen based birth control or if they will have children through in vitro fertilization.

I am a football fan. I keep up week-to-week and I enjoy the excitement that comes from wondering whether or not my team will make it to the playoffs. Unfortunately, my team is the Denver Broncos, so I’m not going to hold my breath. Anyway, I get that football gets people riled up, and combine the love of the sport with the love of $9 domestic beers and artery-clogging hotdogs, and you’ve got yourself some trouble, as the NY Jets fans have shown.

In a New York Times article that was published last week, the “alternative halftime show” that has become a tradition at Jets’ games, has been revealed for the disgusting misogynist-fest that it really is. Apparently, fans stand around at halftime chanting at women to show their boobs. Classy. Women who have the misfortune of being called out, either comply to cheers and whistles, or get boos and beer thrown at them if they fail to deliver the goods. I mean, I get that the Jets suck this year, but the entertainment that these fans aren’t getting from their team should NOT come from harassing women. It’s a sickening display of drunken “male-bonding” in which the men who participate feel cooler by making the women feel like total sex-objects. the “real” halftime show. Come Jets fans, it’s time to grow up.

At least according to some British social workers. I understand that they’ve got to keep the baby’s interests in mind, but with five to ten percent of British women 14 to 24 suffering from an ED (and many self-harming on top of that), a significant number of women would be losing their babies.

Not to mention that Fran, the woman mentioned in the article, is currently ED-free, so her eating disorder won’t be endangering her or the fetus, and that even if she did relapse (though of course I hope she won’t), self-harm disorders are just that — self harm, and sufferers rarely abuse others. I hope that the social workers decide to look at her strength in overcoming her rape 10 years ago rather than the “weakness” they insist she has.

A doctor in Kentucky is being investigated for allegedly defrauding Medicaid. At first, I was suspicious. I felt that the article had an awfully anti-choice slant.

Whenever journalists use terms like “normal pregnancy” (when juxtaposing it to a pregnancy that is terminated) or say that the conditions of the clinic are “deplorable” in an article I tend to think that they have a bit of an anti-choice bias… At first I was not sure if Sheikh was trying to provide a service for women in need or if he is trying to cut a profit at the cost of the state. It actually seems to be both. Sheikh, afterall, was making anywhere from 150-800 off the fraudulent Medicaid claims and he was getting paid by the women as well. And it is nearly four years of fraud! It makes you wonder if he did this with other procedures as well…like, how did women with Medicaid know to come to him for abortions? Did he specifically solicit them in order to gain a profit? What do you think? Am I reading too much into this?