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.

I'm jealous of your ignorance.

Amanda Hess at The Sexist writes today about some studies that show a large gap between women's and men's knowledge about how birth control works. This gap is pervasive across different forms of birth control, including condoms. Meaning fewer women self-identify as clueless. About condoms. Things that go on penises. Really.

I argue that this ignorance comes from a widespread lack of knowledge about women's bodies, in both hetero men and hetero women. Sidenote: the lesbians I know have better info about women's bodies than any straight woman I know, nevermind straight men. This narrative that a woman's body is a mystery and impossible to comprehend has got to stop. First of all, women are half the population, so things like birth control and menstruation are daily-life realities for roughly 3 billion people. That means they aren't weird or abnormal. Every time a woman's normal bodily functions are portrayed as singular and strange, it's because we consider the default of humanity to be a man, like women are the exception to the rule somehow. Check out the confusion and agony of this young swain, quoted in the article:

“I dated a girl with a NuvaRing, while I didn’t know she had one,” says a 22-year-old Arlington resident who didn’t discover how the couple was preventing baby-making until his penis was already well inside her vagina. “I found out the physical way, when I felt the alien object. I immediately recoiled in fear, asking what was wrong. It was frightening. Then she told me her birth control was a ring in her vagina, which I had never heard of.” He demanded the evidence. “She retrieved it—which is a sight to see—and showed it to me, put it back, and we continued,” he says. “I feel like girls should tell people.”

What a winner. Here we have: 1) fear that a vagina is a scary place with alien objects that are frightening, 2) COMPLETE LACK OF COMMUNICATION between hetero partners about birth control before they started fucking, and 3) no realization that this situation happened because the girl believed she was responsible for her own birth control, a belief the guy shares by depending on "girls" to teach him about methods of birth control.

This belief that women are exceptions to normal humanity has major implications for women's health. The National Institutes of Health didn't encourage including women into clinical studies until the 80's, and it didn't become law until 1993! That same 1993 law, NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, also mandated including minorities in clinical trials. How did white men become the default representative of humanity? Further, when reading about healthcare savings accounts (HSAs), I stumbled on this argument by Ezra Klein about the misogyny inherent in HSAs. Inequality arises because women and men seek health care in different ways, and women's health care costs more. Why does it cost more? Oh because that's the market! It should cost more! Because women use it more! Because the burden of sex and reproduction falls on women. Women have to know all about birth control and buy it. Nearly all birth control for women has to be accessed through a doctor: diaphragms and cervical caps, IUDs, and hormonal birth control of any kind. In order to get a doctor to perscribe her some birth control, a woman needs to have regular pap smears, STI screenings, and sometimes blood tests. If a woman needs an abortion, her health insurance may not cover it at all and the government certainly won't, so she pays for it if she can. In exchange, hetero women and men together can benefit from planning and spacing births, and from decreased instances of maternal and infant mortality. And men aren't just spared from paying for the birth control, they also have the LUXURY of remaining ignorant about it if they choose.

The most horrible name you can think of

Warning: In the part of this post that discusses sexual assault, which may be triggering for some readers, I use gendered language. In referring to rapists as "he" etc., I do not mean to convey that I think all rapes ever committed were committed by men. I do mean to comport with the statistically accurate assumption that a given rapist will be male.

Whom do you think of when you think of a racist? A Klansman? Someone who lynches people of color or keeps them from voting? It seems that many people I'm talking to lately have a very hard-line definition of a racist, a definition which describes a despicable person, someone to be reviled.

Whom do you think of when you think of a rapist? Are you the priveleged person who thinks of a rapist in the abstract, or are you one of millions of people who can picture a face when you read the word "rapist"? Do you think rapists are evil, sociopathic men who prey upon women or children, people so depraved that you have nothing in common with them?

Absolute definitions for people who commit terrible acts or hold harmful views can be comforting, but they are ultimately harmful. In the case of racism, for instance, if you think a racist kills people of color here are some things that might not seem racist to you:

1. Sending an email of the White House lawn filled with watermelons.
2. Saying some members of a certain racial group are "just better/worse at cleaning or watching kids or certain sports or gardening" than members of other racial groups.
3. Including Asian-American actors in movies, but only if there's a "reason" for them to be Asian. You know, like they're computer scientists or ninjas! This works for other races, too. This also works for movies in which people of color only appear as facilitators for the white characters, suggesting that their lives and life stories are less important than those of the white main characters.
4. Taking for granted that mass media, in advertising, television, and movies, reflects your *white* race almost universally, and not thinking of that as different than the world you live in.
5. Making evolution-based arguments for a thin, white, fair-haired beauty ideal in Western culture, as if all men who desire any woman who does not measure up to that ideal has been obliged to ignore his biologically determined (can't control or change it!) desire for white blondeness.
6. Not noticing that throughout the world fairer, paler, whiter people of all races are overwhelmingly members of the upper classes, while darker complected people are members of the lower classes. Or, if you notice, not even considering that to be the product of systemic racism.

There are others. All of these things reflect a preference in the world for whiteness over black- or brown-ness. Contributing to this structure without questioning it is racist, because the structure is racist. It's called living with "unexamined white privilege", and you can do something about it if you want to. You can have racist views without wanting to kill people who are a different color than you. But, the definition of a racist as a cartoonishly villanous Klansman-type character lets many people off the hook in their own minds for their racism and unexamined privilege. This works in rape, too. Check it out.

In the wake of the Roman Polanski arrest and subsequent flood of apologists, Chris Rock went on the Jay Leno show and reminded us: "Rape is #2! Behind murder! It's the second-worst!" While it is true that rape is horrible, public perception of rapists is similarly horrible. This doesn't really work how you'd expect it to, unfortunately. You'd think that when any heretofore good guy that you know who commits rape, he is no longer considered a good guy. Instead, people rush to defend him: he's a good person, he respects [x] and [x] is a woman, he helped an old lady across the street one time etc. etc. This is particularly insidious when you consider the ways the justice system makes it hard for women to report rape, and for laywers to prosecute rape. There's pressure on a woman alleging rape to drop the charges, lest the investigation into a crime committed against her ruin her rapist's reputation.

I submit the much more nuanced, ugly, and uncomfortable truth: if it were easy to recognize a rapist, fewer rapes would occur. We know that most rapes are committed by non-strangers, a.k.a. acquaintances, partners, co-workers, boyfriends, husbands, fellow soldiers. The idea that a woman can avoid every potential rapist in her sphere is, unfortunately, impossible. It is quite likely you have met a man who has raped someone, and you'd never know it unless you knew it! Think about that. There are people you have met who have sexually assaulted people. People who you and/or the greater society consider "good people" rape other people. Stop apologizing for them just because you like their movies or you had fun drinking with them that one time!

Update: great post on this issue on The Sexist:

The Brothers Karzai: What are we really doing in Afghanistan?

Reports surfaced a couple weeks ago that the CIA is paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai's brother. So this means:

1) The CIA pays A. Karzai.
2) Karzai ALLEGEDLY uses this money in his ALLEGED role as a major player in Afghanistan's opium trade.
3) The opium trade supplies the Taliban.
4) The Taliban kills Americans.

The options are that the generals who want us to increase troops in Afghanistan didn't know that the CIA is pouring money into that country, or they did know. I don't know which would be worse.