Chastened?
Here’s the tl;dr for this post: Dawn Eden made herself a nuisance to this blog and others about five or six years ago. Just Google her name along with that of pretty much any feminist blogger or blog and you’ll see what I mean. Now she’s reared her head again, mentioning me and this blog (and my reviews of her first book) in an interview about her new book. I don’t care all that much about what she said about me, personally, but the interview and book bring up a lot of issues that Dawn and I (as well as other feminist bloggers) have gone at each other over before and which I feel merit a response. Dawn has long been an engaging if fundamentally dishonest writer, particularly on the subject of feminism and women’s sexuality, and in the interview and her book, she accuses feminists of, essentially, causing child sexual abuse by supporting sexual freedom for adult women. In addition, there’s a good bit of inside-baseball stuff about the Catholic church and the clerical sex abuse scandal, and how Dawn addresses – or rather, fails to address – that scandal in the context of a book, written from a specifically Catholic perspective, about using Catholic writings and teaching as a means of healing from childhood sexual abuse.
...read moreProsecuting “Bad” Mothers
A must-read in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about over-zealous Alabama prosecutors bringing charges against drug-addicted mothers. It’s a troubling and complex issue. Obviously no one thinks that using drugs during pregnancy is a good idea. Obviously it is a tragedy when a baby is stillborn, or born with drugs in its system. But many of these cases involve stillbirths which cannot be clearly tied to drug use — all the prosecutors know is that the pregnant woman used drugs (even one time) and the baby was stillborn, and so they assume (and argue, with little to no evidence) causation. And because most folks don’t understand just how complicated pregnancy actually is — and after the 80s “crack baby” hysteria, don’t understand that drug use during pregnancy actually doesn’t usually cause long-term problems in the child — people hear “drug-using mom” and “stillborn baby” and it’s easy to conclude that A led to B, even though that’s not actually how it works.
...read more“I personally prefer the classic term ‘strumpet’.”
So Rush Limbaugh calls a Georgetown law student a slut and a prostitute for having the audacity to talk about birth control, and when pressed to respond Mitt Romney simply says, “It’s not the language I would have used.” Very cool. Very principled!
...read moreFacts, myths, and blankety-blank lies about Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation
As the furor over Komen’s de-funding of Planned Parenthood continues, more and more myths about PP, its mission, and the impact of this cruel and foolish decision are getting thrown around. Frequently, those myths get lost and go uncorrected in the presence of bigger and more ideological arguments.
That’s really not fair.
Alas, this is merely the tip of the bullshit iceberg. As the Komen debacle is nowhere near coming to an end, we can expect new and exciting myths and lies to arise, like the head of a Hydra, as others are debunked. To that end, watch this space, and by all means contribute your own debunkings in comments.
...read moreWomen refuses to give raped daughter EC, brags about it on internet.
Ah, the kindness of pro-lifers: [trigger warning]
...read moreMy Dark-Haired Daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder and limited cognitive abilities, went missing last Monday. For more than 48 hours, we had no idea where she was. Without all the gruesome details, after she was found, it came to light that she’d been brutally and repeatedly sexually assaulted. She’d been taken to the local women’s shelter, where (at least in our area) they do the exams in such cases.
More on Komen and Planned Parenthood
...read moreThe truth is that anti-Planned-Parenthood sentiments aren’t about abortion; they’re about hostility to women, and particularly to female sexuality. Abortion makes up 3% of its services. Cancer screening and prevention are 17%.
Birth Control: Kind of Like Pork Chops
“Pro-life” Catholic colleges are all salty about a new law requiring insurance plans to cover birth control. Because even though 98% of Catholic women will use contraception at some point in their lives, male Catholic leaders have decided that a baby is a gift from God and expecting insurance providers to cover birth control is like expecting pork to be served at a Jewish barbeque:
...read moreHeading Toward Menopause, Still Caring About Abortion
By Andrea Plaid, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine. I’m not an aberration because I’m a childless, employed, divorced, college-educated Black cisgender woman — regardless of what the promulgated stereotypes undergirding the media stories about women like me say. At this point in my life — I’m in my early 40s –I’m drumming my fingers [...]
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Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams
By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.
“Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.
...read morePersonhood Amendments and the Pro-Life Long Game
I’m writing in the Guardian today about the real purpose of personhood amendments. A taste: Pro-lifers don’t actually believe that a fertilised egg is the moral equivalent of a newborn baby – if they did, there would certainly be major pushes for research on why more than half of all these cellular human beings are [...]
...read moreCommon Sense Time.
So Congressional GOP members want to extend Mississippi’s asinine personhood amendment to the whole country. Caperton wrote about the Mississippi bill, and detailed many of the ridiculous ways it will interfere with basic rights — one of the goals of the bill is to outlaw many forms of birth control, and it will undoubtedly be [...]
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