Choice Words

RH Reality Check posted a piece this morning that I wanted to pass on, it’s an example of a very quick effective pro-life grassroots strategy that cut off support services for women seeking abortions in New Jersey.

The Family Research Council, led by Tony Perkins, convinced a New Jersey hotel to stop offering discounted room rates to women coming to the state seeking abortion care. Read more about it here.

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.

Just this past week, California legislators successfully passed a bill requiring insurances to cover the vaccination Gardasil. This bill also will require insurance to cover cervical cancer treatment as well as annual cervical cancer testing. There also has been international efforts, like the United Kingdom, to pass similar laws to protect women from cervical cancer. This is a great victory for Californian women and girls since it has reported the most cases of cervical cancer in the country annually. Hopefully other states shall do the same and adopt California’s new bill.

Guest Blogger Avery Dame is a student at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa and a leader of their Choice Alabama chapter.

“They’ve killed more blacks than the KKK,” the protester shouted as the woman tried to get in her car outside a women’s health clinic. I was escorting in Birmingham, Ala., the day after I had returned home from Choice USA’s Gloria Steinem Membership conference. Throughout the past week, I had been in a safe progressive bubble, lobbied my congressmen, and enjoyed hanging out with like-minded folks.

But now it was back to reality, of which the above quote is sadly more a part than I’d like to admit.

Such ugly rhetoric that references historic expressions of racism, like lynching, is not uncommon among anti-abortion advocates, especially in the places where it holds the most impact. It’s a close relative to rhetoric that expresses a belief in the inarguable reality of systematic racism, like ‘well, if those blacks would just stop being irresponsible and having babies,’ (a paraphrase of something once said to my chapter’s vice-president). But the ‘reverse accusation of racism’ is even harder to fight.

Reverse accusations place the advocate in the difficult position of proving their right to exist. Furthering the argument’s logic, clearly the clinic should shut down because its advocates are taking part in that which they stand against (racism). However, the situations wherein this rhetoric is most often expressed, unsurprisingly, give no chance for debate. Not all of us are Ross Perot and don’t leave home without our pie charts on historic economic disparity (that reference is so going to date my pop culture knowledge).

And reverse-accusation rhetoric is even more powerful in states with historic race issues, especially the Deep South. An in-depth examination of the causes behind the high number of women of color who get abortions is nothing against the emotional impact of reverse racism yelled at high volume at its most vulnerable targets in a state where the phantom of the KKK still remains a threat right at the edge of the state’s collective vision, regardless of the actual reality of the Klan’s power.

So nothing is more frustrating than trying to calm a clinic client or friend of a client down lest they cross the street and violently act out their own frustration, when you would rather happily provide them with even more incentive.

But that same inability to argue is why I escort. Because the best thing I feel I can do in the in the fifteen seconds when a woman is entering or exiting a clinic is to say with my presence that I don’t agree, that I believe the protester’s rhetoric is wrong, and that I’ll do my best to defend a client’s right to a safe environment when making such a hard decision. Anti-discrimination advocacy and education do great long-term good and are often the best bet to stop future expressions of discrimination, but they cannot always immediately deal with the problems of the now. The overall solution breaks down into several different parts.

So I wake up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and stand out in the early morning light to place my presence between a client and yelling protesters. I listen to people’s stories, I swear right along with clients or friends to diffuse the anger, and hope one day I won’t have to fill my veins with coffee so people can have what little safe space I can provide that week to make their choice, whatever it be, without outside pressure.

So my journey has come to an end. I just completed the journey of a lifetime biking 1,800+ miles from the Big Easy to the Big Apple with Wanderlust 2008, a reproductive justice bike tour. We came together for reproductive justice, and to see how this framework is laying out in the South and up along the coast.

I was the youngest of all the riders (being 20 years old), and by far the most out of shape! The first week was hell for me. Our first day we biked 55 miles. I had never biked that many miles in my ENTIRE life! As each day progressed the mileage increased. As our mileage increased, so did the hills. Towards the end of the trip we were tackling 92 mile days in the hot sun. After a full day of biking we would arrive to our destination and begin to set up camp (unpacking our gear out of our SAG wagon (safety vehicle), setting up our personal tents and the communal bug tent, and preparing dinner). We had a variety of eating preferences on the trip—meat eaters, meat eaters that don’t eat red meat, vegetarians, vegans, and a gluten-free member. We had to be especially careful not to mix gluten products with our meals, so we took extra care when we were preparing our meals.

After dinner we would sit by the glow of our lanterns and work on the dishes and repack the van so raccoons would not steal our food. Most of the time we would head to bed around 11:30pm due to the nightly meetings we had. At 7:00am the breakfast crew would wake up and prepare breakfast. As soon as breakfast was prepared Erin (one of the riders) would play on her flute to wake us all up. Breakfast was done at 8:00am. After breakfast we would communally tear down our kitchen and then pack up our belongings and load the van. Loading the van was difficult because we had to fit EVERYTHING in the van and make sure certain things were accessible when needed. Finally we would do our cue sheets (our directions for the day), discuss where the van should meet us for lunch, and hit the road. Once we hit the road we all usually spread out due to the differences of biking strengths with each of the members. By the end of the six weeks I was pedaling stronger and faster. I never was in the front of the pack, but managed to complete the journey that seemed like an impossible feat when we left on May 26th.

With Wanderlust we created something magical on the road. We lived in our own little bubble. I was not only challenged physically, but mentally as well. Let me tell you, it is VERY difficult to live with 14 other smart, witty, strong women. We slept together, ate together, biked together; we were each other’s world for six amazing weeks.

We had some amazing moments together. One of my favorite memories was when we were in Hubbard’s Landing, Alabama and we dressed up in costumes just because we wanted to, for a free dinner at the only restaurant in town. People stared and smiled and asked us what we were doing in town. We explained reproductive justice to them and passed out our handmade business cards. The evening ended with a piano sing-along with an elderly woman, Ms. Cathy, on piano.

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A Grand Jury refused to indict Dr. Tiller, one of the nation’s only late-term abortion providers, saying that they found no crime related to abortion laws.

What scares me is that the Grand Jury did state (and I’m willing to bet that it was pointed) that unless law in Kansas provides clearer guidelines it is unlikely that Dr. Tiller will be indicted. You know what this means right? That we’re more than likely going to see a rush of anti-abortion legislation in the next six months.

What scares me even more… are the comments.

Elise Higgins is a Junior at the University of Kansas where she is a student in the Political Science and Women and Gender Studies departments. Elise first came to Choice USA through the Birth Control Access Campaign and continues to work for reproductive justice at the University of Kansas as the president of Commission on the Status of Women as well as through her position of the Delta Force Sexuality and Safety Task Force Chair. Because of all her amazing work for social justice and women’s rights, Elise was the recipient of the Jayhawk Choice Awards’ Organization Member of the Year.

Y’all, I’m a Kansan lady, and no stranger to extreme anti-choice rhetoric. But even I was incredulous when I read the opening line of this article, brought to you by the Kansas Coalition. The article discusses a petition sent to the US Supreme Court by the Kansas Coalition for Life. It’s, predictably, one to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision stating that most state laws against abortion violate our right to privacy. So that we’re on the same page, Roe v. Wade essentially legalizes abortions for any reason up until a fetus is “viable,” or able to exist outside the uterus. My jaw-dropping moment happened when I read the term “unlimited abortions,” which, for me, evokes images of a slot machine or a giant giveaway, rather than a deeply personal medical decision. KCL goes on to insist that it’s protecting “unborn children” in its crusade against abortion, but fails to recognize what actually happens during an abortion, the circumstances surrounding the procedure and the horrendous circumstances, (physical abuse, drug abuse, sickness, starvation, a broken foster care system) into which children whose mothers have no access to abortion are born. Those are only two examples of the gross generalizations and factual inaccuracies pervading this article.

I’d like to walk through the article with you and do my best to dispel some of the assertions that LifeNews.com and Kansas Coalition for Life make on a daily basis.

First, Kansas Coalition for Life seems to believe that they’ve created some sort of groundbreaking “precedent” which will allow all citizens to have a say in Supreme Court decisions. This notion could not be further from the truth. Let’s start with the petition itself, the crux of their argument that their group can influence the highest court in the land. Their biggest talking point is the fact that it was accepted by the Supreme Court. However, the farthest into the Court that anyone in Kansas Coalition for Life got was a telephone conversation with an aid to Justice Kennedy. To call the petition “accepted” is an exaggeration: It reveals that it was received by the United States Supreme Court *Police Office.* Neat, but hardly an endorsement from the highest court in the land, (be sure to notice, too, that signing the petition is apparently “more important than voting.” Sort of seems counter-productive to discourage civic engagement, but I’m not complaining). Special interest groups such as Kansas Coalition for Life are the very reason that the general public has absolutely no influence over Supreme Court decisions. KCL draws a parallel between their ability to sway Justice Kennedy, whom they call the Court’s “swing vote,” and Pontius Pilate, the judge that decided, at the urging of a mob, to execute Jesus.

It’s an interesting comparison, but incredibly off-base. The Justices of the Supreme Court hardly ever expose themselves to popular media, much less shouting at anti-choice mobs.

Can popular opinion, in the form of general election outcomes, affect court decisions? Of course. However, groups like KCL are kidding themselves if they believe that their petition will persuade the Court to issue a writ of certiorari, (basically, 4 justices have to vote to send up the records of a case from a lower court for review) and rule in KCL’s favor on a case conflicting with Roe v. Wade.

That brings me to another reason that KCL just isn’t doing its homework. Let’s talk about “partial birth abortions” for just a second. THEY DON’T EXIST. No, really, there is no such thing as a partial birth abortion. The term has never even been concretely defined in any Supreme Court decision, but has rather been interpreted to cover a wide range of medical and surgical abortion procedures. When it is defined, it varies widely from state to state. The particular type of abortion to which I think the KCL is referring is a third-trimester one, which happen very rarely, (comprising less than 2% of all abortions in the US) and are generally necessary because of medical reasons, severe fetal abnormalities or massive, institutionally created delays in access to first or second trimester abortions. At the time that the fetus is removed from the womb by way of dilating the cervix, it is no longer living-the woman has been given an injection, (with the aid of a local anesthetic) which stops the fetal heart instantly. There is no “partial birth,” whatsoever-the term “partial birth abortion” is nothing more or less than a rhetorical trick designed by the anti-choice movement to scare and shame those who would seek or have sought a late-term abortion.

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Yesterday was such a historic day here in California that will, undoubtedly, affect change throughout the United States and I was lucky enough to be in the midst of it all. I am on an absolutely high.

Hundreds of same-sex couples across the state of California were finally granted equality, dignity, and respect by their government. These loving and committed couples stood up in front of witnesses and declared their union to one another, and the state listened and affirmed them. Finally. The first wedding that took place in California was that of long-time LGBT activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin who have been together for 55 years. If it weren’t for their dedication, courage, and enduring love, this moment would never have happened. I was blessed enough to be at their wedding and to hear them echo words of love and devotion to one another after 55 years and state “I never thought this would happen in my lifetime.” But it did!!

Yesterday, at City Hall was a very surreal scene of couples who have been together, and have been married in every other sense of the word, finally affirmed by their government. It was extremely powerful to hear the words “by the power vested in me by the state of California, I know pronounce you spouses for life” and to know that the world is a much better place because of what is taking place here in California. The entire institution of marriage has been strengthened by what has happened here and I am extremely proud to say that I am a part of this movement.

To the hundreds of newlyweds in my state, I wish you all the happiness in the and my most sincerest CONGRATULATIONS.

Over the past three years Californians have defeated the two attempts made at passing a Parental Consent Law. With our extremely valid points and fierce consciousness raising skills, we convinced Californians that a law forcing family communication would be incredibly harmful to underage girls. Unfortunately its on the ballot again. They have looped it in yet another form and fashion in their attempts to convince us that girls under the age of 18 are not capable of making their own decisions about their lives. In an attempt to be an optimist(Which rarely happens), I am going to stay positive are reassure myself that we will defeat Initiative 1249. There are concrete examples of how these initiatives detriment the lives of these young women and those are around them. One of which is the Atlanta Journal- Constitution recently published article.
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