Womanhood 2012

It's a scary time to be a woman in the United States these days. It's been scary for women for an agonizingly long time in the Congo, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt and India... many places equal rights are a dream, sexual assault is often justified and almost expected in many instances, and where you're reduced to/exploited for your ability to procreate, and otherwise ordered to close your legs.

But American women, who won their freedom to choose their own reproductive path decades ago have been watching their rights erode over the past few years. How far can Republicans go to restrict women and take them back to a time where their fetuses and embryos had more rights than their mothers? Well, read here. And thankfully this link is the President's reaction, which should offer some semblance of sanity in an insane situation.

In Canada, there are nuts out there who are seeking to re-criminalize abortion by asserting the personhood of fetuses. Now, I do think it's a shame when a pregnancy occurs to an unwilling party. It's sad because no one goes through life hoping that will happen. I mean, "unwanted pregnancy" pretty well outlines this is undesired. And it's undesired because all the options available suck.

Abortion? Well, I know of no woman who dreams of having one of those. But the other options require you to endure a pregnancy, which is no small matter, plus a delivery (Also a massively huge deal) and a recovery process, which can take a long time. And if you're unprepared for parenting, you have to consider whether you'd be capable of going through all of this and then giving your baby away, a baby every hormone in your body is urging you to love and keep. Adoption is not so cut and dry as many would like you to think. All you have to do is empathize and you can see how impossible it would be for most women. Those who can do it, kudos. But most cannot and should not be put down for that.

So, in light of these sensible understandings of human nature, why does anyone wish to mess with a woman's right to choose? Who else but her can understand her mind and body better?

I've been getting deeply upset with the anti-choice commercials I've seen on TV lately, the ones with the missing children on milk cartons, that talk about all the lost children due to abortion in Canada. I see red every single time. I mean, there are women who have had abortions seeing this. Why do they deserve to be shamed for making a decision about their bodies and future that they thought was right? It is a legal entitlement to defer or prevent motherhood if you find yourself unexpectedly pregnant.

Luckily, as ass-backwards as our current political party is, our Prime Minister recognizes that the climate in Canada is in favour of leaving people to make their own medical decisions. As many people who are morally opposed to abortion, they don't want to send doctors or women to jail for private choices. Trudeau said the government had no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and that's become a cultural belief.

But still. I don't feel entirely protected. There's a massive push against abortion right now and I don't know what conclusion will eventually be drawn. I will never understand why this is happening.

The Abortion Diaries

I recently watched this video: The Abortion Diaries. With the war on women going on, and yes, there is a war, especially in the United States, I think it's important to tell women's stories.

It's about 30 minutes and it's worth watching. The pro-life (Anti-choice) crowd is getting so much more air time these days. We can't allow ourselves to grow lax. We can't allow the uninformed to choose for us. We can't allow men to decide if we become mothers before we're ready. We must remain vigilant that our rights and our lives are considered more important than the potential lives we may carry.

And people out there are asking the right questions. Take a look at this video when a man asks pro-lifers to think deeper about their stance about abortions being made illegal.

When I was a girl, I thought sexism was over. I thought my mother and grandmother fought that fight for me. No. They fought their fight. There will always be misogynists biding their time, waiting for a new generation of unsuspecting women, ready to push back on hard-won rights, wanting them out of the high paying jobs, not enjoying sex on their terms and having plenty of babies to keep them busy at home.

Why? I have no fucking clue. Hating a massive group of people tends to stem from not really seeing them as people. Or a lack of empathy. Or greed because you want more resources or opportunities for yourself. Or you just really have a superiority complex that must be fed. I don't know.

And why are women pro-life? Lack of empathy, again. Lack of compassion. Lacking sense of sisterhood with other women (not just people you know, but women everywhere). Lack of plain bad luck in life, leading to belief all problems are avoidable. Lack of imagination to conceive of situations abortion would be best. Lack of education of what abortion is and the stages of pregnancy. Fear of social stigma in community. Misplaced sense of self-righteousness.

I worry about American women, who are losing their right to reproductive freedom week by week. Soldiers are cheered as "fighting for our freedom," when in fact there are no invading threats to American freedom from outside the country. Sure, there are terrorist groups, but they're incapable of sustaining such a coup as to take down the country. But there is a threat to American freedom, to the pursuit of happiness. It's coming from within the ranks of governments across the land and it's attacking the freedom of half the population.

I'm a Canadian, so I'm out of the American political conversation and voting. But I feel the sisterhood. I want better for American women. I want them stand up and cry foul. I want men to say this is crazy; we need to stop doing this to our mothers and daughters and sisters and nieces and wives. I want everyone to stop fussing over what is unborn and start giving a massive shit about those who are actually here.

I also don't want this bullshit crossing the border.

Musings

Sometimes I think about the world we live in and I get scared. I mean, not scared in the way you get if you live in the wrong part of Los Angeles. I don't fear I'll die or be mugged at gunpoint.

I'm scared about where we're headed as a species and as a civilization.

We're overpopulated. There's only so much space for humans to live, for agriculture to feed us, and for all the other deserving species of animal and plant to grow and thrive. And we've hit that mark. I want a child and I feel significant guilt about it because I don't want to inflate the numbers even a little.

We're whipping through petroleum, which is responsible for, frankly, our entire way of life, which has been unevenly distributed for the past 100 years, and now we're running out and there seems to be no contingency plan. I mean, there's finite resources and we're burning through them. And economists are calling for growth! Growth! Growth! Why? What about maintenance? Maintenance! Maintenance!

We're overpopulated and powerful influences like the Catholic church are warring against contraception, despite the fact nearly all Catholics use it. American politicians are doing all they can to remove a woman's right to choose, to actually declare an embryo a person.

Which would make miscarriages a homicide investigation. You could arrest a pregnant woman for drinking. Plan B would be illegal, as well as in-vitro-fertilization. They're already forcing women to undergo ultrasounds, whether the doctor deems it necessary or not, and the doctors have to describe the fetus. There was a bill mandating a vaginal probe ultrasound prior to getting an abortion, never mind what the doctor thinks is needed, just to punish the woman, basically.

We have all these human beings in the world who can't eat, who have inadequate care, and they're trying to ensure all possible pregnancies result in babies, whether the mother in question wants to or not? One fucker wants to mandate women carry dead fetuses until their wombs expel the remains, because that's what livestock does. Because women are livestock.

I always knew these types didn't look at women as people, but it's less common that you get such flagrant evidence of it.

The world is totally different than it was when I was a kid. So in 20 more years, it should be totally different yet again. I'm not a doomsayer, but I can't help but feel a sense of impending calamity. Toronto was warm and snowless this winter. In the last 65 years it's never been so dry and warm. It's unnatural. Between what feels like a collapsing understanding of rights for women, overpopulation becoming a problem, growth depleting our resources and the climate altering into god knows what, I'm feeling nervous.

Maybe this is why The Walking Dead is popular right now. It's like everyone else is feeling a sense of the end of an era of time. When I was a kid, the United States was the world superpower, I grew up in the affluent '90s, and snow covered the ground. Things are changing. People are more aware of that, too, I think thanks to the internet.

I know I'm not alone here.

Planned Parenthood Hurrah

Okay, late night quickie post. You know how in the States there's this bullshit talk of defunding Planned Parenthood? You know, the place women can go for affordable sexual healthcare, like STD screenings, cervical cancer screenings, contraception, prenatal healthcare AND abortion? Well, here's my view on this:



Also, here's a kitten:

Status Quo

Every now and then I get on my feminism horse and go for a gallop. It's a horse that needs frequent exercise and not enough women ride it.

I've been following a number of blogs (Obviously). I've posted the funny ones, the STFU ones, but more seriously, I actively read Rabble Pro-Choice, Feministing and Slut Had It Coming.

In particular, today on SHIC, I read this passage about abortion:

If you believe abortion is OK in instances of rape but not in cases of consensual sex, ask yourself: Why? Am I really all that concerned about the “unborn”—because remember, it’s not that fetus’s fault if the woman carrying it was raped—or am I making a moral judgment about the behavior of the woman involved and whether or not I think she “deserves” the right to an abortion based on her behavior? If the latter, what you’re indulging in is misogyny (yes, even if you’re a woman) and slut-shaming, and there’s nothing admirable, fair, or right about that.

And that really spoke to me. I felt that way when I was a teenager, before I became a real person (i.e. a thinking person). But really, if you think abortion is murder, rape or incest should not matter because the fetus is a person. To be consistent, you'd truly have to disregard all circumstances of the fetus' conception. And of course, that would make you a douche utterly lacking in compassion.

And most people are compassionate. So they say in the event of rape or incest, let the poor woman abort, so long as she feels bad about it. But if she actually, liked the sex, slut better be having that baby, yo. And that's fucked up.

Sometimes (often) I get fed up by other people's expectations and projections of what a woman should be, or what a woman must be if she deviates from these pre-conceived ideas. I tried to show some family my belly dance moves and it was implied I did it for dollar bills and I was asked to sit down. I won't lie, that really hurt my feelings. I also felt misunderstood, and was baffled that an expression of my femininity must thus be a ploy to attract and extrapolate attentions and money from men. I couldn't enjoy the movements of my body and dance for me. It had to be a sexual thing. Because I'm a woman.

This is a common belief. Have you ever heard of the Bechdel Test? It's what you ask yourself before you watch a movie:
1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man

And you know what? Those are effing rare. I actually can't think of very many movies I've ever seen that fit this criteria. They're out there, but try to come up with 10. See how long that takes. Movies with two or more men who talk to each other about something other than women are easy to find. Try to come up with 20. It'll take you less time.

In fact, most of our childhoods were pretty much consumed with this problem: The Smurfette Principle. And it starts on Sesame Street. Sesame Street fails the test. A show supposedly gender neutral for children fails the test. It's the first damn thing kids see and half the population is not catered to. Why? Because males are considered some sort of default for human kind and females are secondary.

So what do you wind up with? You wind up with women, who are perceived as weaker versions of men, whose lives revolve around men and attracting men. You have women-centred plots and female leads considered as for women only, and male leads considered for everybody. You have those female stories frequently being driven by the relationship the women have with men and that's pretty much it. You have girls growing into women with few truly female stories to call their own.


You know how if a man admits to liking something feminine he has to be embarrassed and apologize? And if a women likes masculine things, she can brag about it? Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Even when it comes to homosexuals, gay men get shortchanged because they're identified as more feminine, whereas lesbians though still prejudiced against, get a male seal of approval because it's sexy (and being considered masculine at the very least suggests power or intellect).

So no, women are not considered by many as having the right to choose because they're not considered strong or independent from male imput, and this is not only bred into us from an early age, it's perpetuated on an hourly basis all our lives. It's all connected. It all stems from thinking women either aren't as smart as men, aren't as relateable as human beings, are here for the pleasure of men, and essentially are a variation of men as people rather than people in their own right.

We have women trying to garner respect by rejecting femininity because they believe having a feminine side is bad. It's like the black girl saying the white doll is better and sadly hesitating before admitting she looks like the black doll. It's crap.

I don't need to hear "Sex And The City is actually a pretty good show," as though it's surprising that a story about women could be good. I'm tired of men being embarrassed to admit to liking feminine things. The only reason behind it is the inferiority we associate with femininity, as though it's actually shameful to be that way, as though femininity is something to apologize for.

I mean, even the word feminist has a bad rap as "man hating". You know, because women thinking of themselves as people, and deserving of opportunities is still so foreign a concept that it has to be steered back to women and the way they feel about men. I love men, but it's not all about them. To hell with the status quo.

End rant. For now.

We will choose

I read a lot of blogs. I've mentioned this before. The subject of abortion never fails to capture my attention and interest. I'm a pro choice woman. I don't leave any doubt about that when the topic arises. I don't know how I feel about abortion, as a moral stance, other than that I feel is best left up to the consciences and hearts of the women who face that prospect.

I've had one pregnancy scare and I've taken two pregnancy tests in my life. Once was when I was 19 and the other was last year. The more recent one I was 95% sure I was not pregnant, but I wanted confirmation. When I was 19 I was more nervous. I was young, inexperienced in adult life, in college and living in a family's basement.

And while I was worrying, I realized then that I considered abortion a valid option. Not one I was ready to commit to, but one to consider strongly. I was on the pill, but in my whole history of taking it, I never got the hang of keeping it to a strict schedule.

I remember crying in bed, praying (I was still a Catholic in my heart in those days, if not a practicing one) and asking God to forgive me if I had to abort. I went home and while at my father's I went to the local drug store, bought a test, took it home, and disposed of it in the trash can at the neighbourhood park. It was negative and I had my life back.

I never forgot the fear, though. And knowing a taste of that fear, which I only truly experienced in the hypothetical, has stayed with me. I don't look at abortion as right or wrong, but rather if it's the right or wrong choice for a woman as an individual.

I came across this today, which broke my heart and spurned me again to touch on this topic. It's a tragic story involving a woman's choice, and one can only imagine the further grief she would have endured had her right to choose not been available to her. I think we as women, along with being born able to make babies, are born with an innate ability to choose and make the right choice. We have this gift because we need it. Even a very pro-life woman who gives birth to an unwanted baby has made a choice.

Without choice, our bodies aren't our own. Without lawful choice, our bodies belong to the governments that regulate us. We are not our uteri. We, as gatekeepers of all human life that enters this world, will decide when the time is right. Not our governments, not religious leaders, not men, not lobbyists. Us. It's a grave responsibility to bring a new person into the world, but it's not an obligation.

Sex Ed

My job is so strange sometimes. Last week I learned what the euphemism for "tossing a salad" meant. Today I learned how to behave if I encounter a wild bear. Quite a variety of channels at play here. I do so enjoy what I do. Most days anyway.

I bought the new Freakonomics book, SuperFreakonomics, yesterday and it's already as fun and interesting as the first one. I've already finished the chapter on how a prostitute is like a department store Santa. I love books like that, out of the box thinking type books that buck conventional wisdom in favour of a complex yet simplified look at stats and figures.

I want more quiche. This means I will have to make more quiche, as vain though it may be to say it, my quiche that I made this past weekend was the best I've had in my life. In a way, it's probably good I'm a wee lazy in kitchen matters, because that quiche was also loaded in fat. Lots of protein, though. But lots of fat.

I still want another one.

I read an article today that spoke to me about sex ed in schools. I remember my sexual education via the Catholic school system over 10 years ago: Here are the mechanics. Here are the undesirable consequences. DON'T DO IT!!!1! Jesus! Throw in a video of a woman giving birth with some closeups of the crowning head and you're done.

The article was about pleasure-based sex ed, letting girls in particular know that it's supposed to feel good. I can speak for myself that no one ever told me that, and had I known it was supposed to be enjoyable, I don't think I would have allowed certain things to pass when I was a teen. My first boyfriend at 16 would have been dumped promptly for being so inept with his fingers.

I don't think abstinence education makes any sense. Telling people not to do something isn't education. It's issuing orders you don't have the authority to enforce. Parents don't even have the authority to enforce abstinence, not really. A person's sexual autonomy (and age of legal consent) occurs before the age of 18 and there's little that can be done to prevent it.

There's also the creepy idea that teenagers are children. They're not. Teenagers are sexual. Children are not. Teens have pubic hair, sexual urges, developed sex characteristics and an ability to procreate. Children have none of these things. So teens hence are not children. They have differing needs, one of which is a need of information about their sexuality, the type of information that will enable them to act safely in their choices.

I suppose it's hard for parents to be objective about their kids, whom they've diapered and kissed away their boo-boos and taught to ride a bike. I imagine it's hard to acknowledge that your child is not physically a child any longer and has sexual urges and a body that can and wants to act on them. And being unable to view your offspring as sexual may further incline a person to wish to prevent them from having a sex life. It probably feels creepy to even think about.

But that's just not realistic. Parents have a lot of say over what their teen does, but it stops at being able to direct the course of their sex lives. If a teen isn't going to learn from their parents about all things sex, someone's got to tell them, you know, before they get pregnant and infected. As for preventing them from having sex in the first place, if they're not making babies or passing along disease or putting themselves at risk with god knows who, I couldn't be bothered what consenting people do with other consenting people.

Abortion

Lately I've been reading a lot of feminist research, literature and articles. As time has gone on I've felt a subtle push against women's rights and freedoms, perhaps as a backlash of the feminist movement which changed the Western world and ruffled many feathers. I think maybe also with gay rights now in the forefront gaining more and more recognition, the same sorts of people who either hate change or can't empathize with people who aren't just like them are tightening their holds elsewhere.

Abortion laws, in particular. The Stupak amendment, which although won't affect me or my fellow country women in Canada, is pretty much on of the emerging great tragedies to women's healthcare of the new millennium. Seriously. No funding for abortion? None?

Here in Canada it's federally funded. Women have the right to choose and choose they do. Of course there are organizations like The Back Porch, located in where else but Alberta, who more or less work against Planned Parenthood and counsel women to continue their pregnancies. Which, I have to say is pretty unethical. I've been doing a lot of reading about this group. Their goal is to talk to "abortion-minded" women. This translates to mean "we actively talk women out of the choices they've decided to make." And they don't advertise this. So women with an unwanted pregnancy and are looking to explore their options can find themselves in the hands of these pro-lifers whose concern is not for the woman herself, but her fetus.

And this rather pisses me off. Yes, a fetus does eventually become a baby. But until it's actually of this world and a separate entity from its mother, it's not a person. It's certainly reasonable for an individual to feel differently about that and consider a fetus a person if they choose. But it's no longer reasonable to enforce that feeling into either law or another person's decision making.

Consider: The risk of an abortion is 13 times less likely to result in complications/death than giving birth. The risk of severe mental anguish is distinctly higher for women undergoing adoption than abortion. In countries where abortion is illegal, a total of over 70,000 women die from unsafe abortion practices each year.

So who are we going to care about? Whose life should matter? A full-grown woman with a life, dreams, responsibilities? Or a grouping of cells which have yet to form into full person and is engaged in a parasitic relationship with its host? Yes, the wording is harsh, but pregnancy while important and beautiful is also a reckless force of nature that if imposed on a woman without her consent is cruel to her body and mind. I object to laws and movements which treat women like vessels. It's not a woman's fault she was born with a uterus and she is not under any obligation to give birth at any time.

But going back to the adoption path... if there's one thing that strikes me as terribly painful, it's continuing a pregnancy to term, giving birth and then giving my baby away just as all the chemicals kick in to create a devoted attachment to it. Then to recover from the birth, breasts leaking milk that no one drinks, hormones dropping and causing mood swings with no recourse to feel better because every day forward will be a day you're not with or raising the baby your entire being is calling to. This is a deeply personal decision that no woman should feel compelled to make due to another person or people's agenda, any more than a woman should be compelled to have an abortion for reasons that are not her own.

There have been people in the pro-life movement who claim something called Post Abortion Syndrome, citing high risk of depression, self loathing and suicidal thoughts. However, the American Psychological Association has studied this issue and has concluded: "Although there may be sensations of regret, sadness, or guilt, the weight of the evidence from scientific studies indicates that legal abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in the first trimester does not pose a psychological hazard for most women." Women coerced into an abortion from family or unsupportive partners are more likely to experience these negative feelings, which only highlights the importance of allowing a woman to examine her own feelings and needs and make the right decision for her.

I could rant on and on about this, I really could. Whether a single mother of two needs an abortion in her second trimester because the child is going to be severely disabled and she cannot care for it without detriment to her existing children, or a woman in an abusive relationship can't bring a child into violence, or any woman with a new or current health condition makes pregnancy dangerous or fatal, or her necessary medications will critically damage her fetus, or she was raped or requires a D&C after a miscarriage (Which still counts as an abortion, even though the fetus is dead and D&C prevents infection or infertility), the choice must be hers.

I'll leave this rant with a cartoon which depicts how I feel about the direction the United States is going with their healthcare.


Jerry's condition is unchanged at this point, and if it remains so, my next rant may have to with birth control access, which of course is directly related to this post.