Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Your agenda is showing

The pro-life agenda is dedicated to controlling women by means of allocating all the costs of sex onto women's bodies. It is not about babies, or rights, or fully informing women of their choices.

How do I know?

Part I:If your argument is "if you don't like it, don't have sex" then you need to check your privilege.
In Utah, it is a criminal offense to induce your own miscarriage. The article says this law comes from the case of a woman who, pregnant at 7 months, paid someone $150 to beat her until she miscarried. And in Utah, the SOLUTION to this problem, is to PUT GIRLS LIKE HER IN JAIL. Do you see how punishment follows punishment here? In a state where they won't teach comprehensive sex education, where they allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control, where none of the 8 Planned Parenthood clinics offers abortion, they want to jail a girl who would not submit to being forced to give birth.

If this were about controlling birth and keeping fetuses from dying, this girl would have been taught to USE BIRTH CONTROL. Birth control would have been MADE AVAILABLE TO HER. Instead, it's about sex, and the argument is that if she didn't have sex, she wouldn't have gotten pregnant and run so far out of options that having a friend beat her until she miscarried seemed like a legitimate plan.

News flash, assholes in the Utah legislature: this girl has a fundamental, constitutionally guaranteed right to her bodily autonomy. She has a legal right to have sex if she is over the age of consent. She, an unmarried person, has a legal right to use birth control. See Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). She has a legal right to an abortion! Now you want to put her in jail for doing something that, to anyone with a shred of empathy, was an obvious last-ditch effort to keep herself from having a baby she didn't want. You've made any chance that this girl could have sex responsibly highly unlikely. You've made her options for terminating her pregnancy virtually unattainable. And now you want to JAIL HER because she found herself pregnant and desparate. When you erode the availability of her rights, such that she cannot access them, you are violating those rights. Stop thinking about how you can stop people from having the kind of sex you don't approve of and give women like her their RIGHTS BACK.

Part II: Data tells you how to avoid abortions. Hint: does not include criminalizing miscarriages.
Anyone who respects anything resembling data can tell you that investing in family planning SAVES WOMEN'S and BABIES' LIVES. Check out this study from The Guttmacher Institute. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the short of it:

The report found that doubling the world's current annual spending of $12 billion on family planning and maternal and newborn health programs in developing nations would radically cut the number of mothers and babies that die each year—maternal deaths would drop by 70%, and newborn deaths would be reduced by 44%. A host of other health, societal and economic benefits would follow.

Significantly, these dramatic improvements can only be achieved by simultaneously investing in family planning and maternal and newborn health care. As the report documents, every dollar invested in family planning boosts the overall effectiveness of each dollar spent on maternal and newborn health care. A combined investment achieves the same dramatic results—for $1.5 billion less than investing in maternal and newborn health care services alone.


Meaning? When you spend money on comprehensive, science based sex education and subsidize birth control, you gain huge momentum in the fight against problems as far-ranging as overpopulation, HIV infection, illiteracy and lack of education, preventable disabilities, high-cost health care problems like fistula, and most importantly, maternal and infant mortality rates. The Guttmacher Institute study applies mostly to the developing world, but its findings are as applicable to the U.S. as to poorer countries. Meanwhile, in the U.S. federal funds were spent on abstinence-only sex education for years, and Nancy Pelosi was pilloried for suggesting that birth control subsidies would help our struggling economy.

Birth control and sex education are so, so important that I find it difficult to believe that we in the U.S. are still fighting about whether making these available will hurt our "don't have sex" message. People, the "don't have sex" message doesn't work. It's paternalistic and creepy: why are you worried about what other people do with their bodies? The data is clear. Spend a little, save a lot. That's a hugely understandable win in the cost-benefit world. If the powers that be in the U.S. could just get over the "no sex is the best sex, unless I say it's ok" message, women would be WAY better off.

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