Again? Seriously?

If you can ignore the clearly anti-Muslim connotations,
it actually makes a decent point. (click image to enlarge)

Oh, come on now. Was that really necessary, South Dakota?

I swear, that state keeps breaking my heart. I fell in love, for a short stint, with the voters of South Dakota on election night this past November, because they'd come through for me, for women all over the country, and voted down the abortion ban. And then I fell out of love, when I realized that the strategy we had to employ, the one that alienated a good number of the women who may need abortions, was the only strategy that would have worked in that state.


But now, they've gone too far. Yet again.

Later today (at about 11am), South Dakota legislators are scheduled to announce the introduction of a new abortion ban. This time, with the exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the woman that the last one left out. The exceptions whose absence allowed us to win in South Dakota in November.
Mike Rounds, the governor who signed the ban last year and got re-elected in November, has already said that he likes the proposed legislation. As have a number of the co-sponsors and supporters of last year's ban. Including Bill Napoli, who, in one of the more depressing outcomes of the election, was unfortunately re-elected.


It's almost, sorta, vaguely uplifting that there is a little bit of resistance, even from past supporters of the ban. They think that South Dakota is suffering from "abortion fatigue," an interesting little term that I do hope holds out. That because of the immense pressure of the last election and ballot initiative, the people of South Dakota would want a break from abortion politics for a while. So these legislators are proposing that the new, more "viable" ban be tabled for a year or two. Which would be nice, since putting it off gives us more time to push it off the table entirely. So, here's hoping. (Even when there's seemingly little reason to hope.)

Le sigh.

Roe turns 34...

(click the image to sign up)

strategy vs. conscience

I know, I know, it's been forever since I've updated. But I haven't forgotten about this blog, I swear. It just gets a little hard to keep up with when I'm trying to get through my senior year of college and having crazy relationship problems and insane amounts of schoolwork and intense campaign-induced senioritis.
I will eventually get back to regular updates, although I can't make any promises as to when that will be. Maybe during January, when I'm hanging around Northampton between the fall and spring semesters with nothing but cover letters and resumes and research to do.

But for now, I wanted to write about feminist existential crises. Specifically, the one that I've been trying to resolve since returning from South Dakota.


Election Day Morning Visibility, Brookings, SD
Background: I spent the 5 days leading up to The Big E-day (election day, Nov 7th) in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (and Brookings, SD, and Watertown, SD), volunteering with the Campaign for Healthy Families. PPFA/PP Action Fund paid for my plane ticket, hotel room, and food in exchange for my volunteering 5 days of my time to work against Referred Law 6, the abortion ban signed into law by SD Gov. Mike Rounds (who was, incidentally, somehow re-elected this year) last March. See, instead of PP challenging the ban in courts, as the legislators and governor had hoped and prepared for in hopes of overturning Roe, the SD Campaign for Healthy Families collected signatures and put the ban on the ballot for the voters to decide on. Which meant that an extensive campaign was formed to overturn the ban, which is where PPFA (and the ACLU, who also sent a ton of people) came in.

Jamia (from DC), Christine (native South Dakotan), and Gretchen (from New Haven, CT) - a few of the many incredible people working against Referred Law 6.

It was intense, and moving, and frightening, and life-changingly incredible. And, most importantly, WE WON (and yes, that is me in that picture, second from the left. score for me and Jamia, the two darkest people at the election night party in Sioux Falls. nothing like tokenism to gain you some fame.) I met incredible people, and I was actually doing things, things that mattered, instead of reading about doing things like I've done for the past 3 1/2 years while stuck in academia.

But there was something about the fight/success in South Dakota that never quite sat well with me.
South Dakota's demographics necessitated a strategy that I would not have chosen. SD is a red state. It helped George W get "elected" the first time around, and re-elected the second time. To make generalizations that are supported by polling numbers: they dislike gays (they were one of 7 states who passed the gay marriage bans this election), they don't like dark people (I was about as dark as tolerable, as was made perfectly clear while canvassing with Jamia, the only black person I saw in all of Brookings, where we were stationed most of the week), they don't particularly like women, and they're big on military and while they're split on the Iraq war, in the polls, most South Dakotans approve of it and the job Bushie is doing. In short, South Dakota isn't exactly the kind of bastion of liberalism (except in the traditional sense) that I would feel very comfortable in.


As a visual aid, there were a few of these scattered around the state in the days leading up to the election, with little resistance from South Dakotans.
The SDCHF and PPFA/PP of North Dakota-South Dakota-Minnesota conducted polls early on to give them information to shape their campaign strategy.

The strategy they shaped, then, was one that worked. But not necessarily one I was so ok with, given my conscience.
The approach we had to use was one that focused solely on the lack of exceptions provided in the law. The way it was written, the only exception to the full ban on all abortions exists for women whose lives would be in imminent danger if they were to go through with the pregnancy. There were no exceptions for if a woman's "mere" health were in danger, or for if a woman was the victim of rape or incest. This lack of exceptions, according to the polling that was done, was where the majority of South Dakotans felt the law went too far. And so, that was the part of the law that we attacked.
Our spiel (as I spoke it for between 8-12 hours per day, with the slight Midwest accent that I quickly picked up):

Hi, this is Jen, from the Campaign for Healthy Families. We're just calling [coming by] today to remind you how important it is to get out to vote on Tuesday, and specifically, how important it is to vote No on Referred Law 6. That's the abortion ban that has no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, or for if a woman's health is in danger. This election is going to be very close, so we wanted to make sure that everyone voting No on Referred Law 6 gets out to the polls this Tuesday. Polls will be open from 7am-7pm and you can cast your ballot at ____.

That was the GOTV spiel, not the Voter ID/Persuasion spiel, but the Voter ID/Persuasion spiel still spoke specifically about the lack of exceptions, said that the law "went too far." Still created all these ideological problems for me.

By focusing so intensely and specifically on the lack of exceptions, we were able to persuade voters to vote our way - by a 56%-44% margin, actually. (Still too close for comfort, but still a 12-point margin.)
However, by focusing so intensely and specifically on this lack of exceptions, we also reinforced the hierarchy of circumstances and stigmas surrounding the choice of abortion. That is, we didn't challenge - reinforced, actually - the idea that it's ok to have an abortion if your pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, or if your health or life is in danger, but for other reasons, it's not so ok. If your partner's condom broke? Sucks to be you. If the Pill just didn't work? Too bad - you shouldn't have been having consensual sex anyway, if you weren't willing to take on the consequences of such actions. It makes pregnancy into a punishment. It makes the right to an abortion contingent on how you got to the place where you need that choice.
Which is ridiculous. Your control over your body doesn't decrease if your pregnancy was not the result of violence. Control over your body is control over your body. You can't qualify it.
But we had to, in order to win. If we'd gone in there with a message that my conscience would have been totally ok with, if we'd used the whole "my body, my choice" line, we would have easily had our asses handed to us and set up the overturning of Roe v Wade. We would have effectively lost the right to abortion for women throughout the country.

So we had to sacrifice our conscience, to a degree. We had to closet ourselves as "radical" pro-choicers who believe in the unqualified right to abortion and focus on qualifiers that were left out of the law.
We had to, in effect, strategize away our conscience for the good of the movement.


But when does it become ok to sacrifice the rights of some (in this case, women who were impregnated not through acts of violence or who didn't have life- or health-threatening pregnancies) in order to secure rights for others? When do these sacrifices become too much?

If you have to strategize away your conscience, how can you be ok with that strategy? If that's the only way you can get even minimal rights for women, does that make it ok? Is it worth it to put the rights of others aside to gain minimal basic rights for those that the majority will give rights to? Is strategic incrementalism really what the feminist movement should be embracing? Can we ignore the rights of some (even "temporarily") in favor of small gains for others (usually white, middle- or upper-class women)?


I know that as an activist, I'm not going to always be able to take the stands I feel comfortable taking because the situation is not always going to allow for it. I know that you can't be idealistic and pretend that the message you want to send will be warmly received in the majority of America. Because the fact remains that the majority of this country is not as pro-choice as I am. Doesn't believe that bodily integrity is a fundamental human right that should be extended to women. And while that's what we have to work toward changing, that's also what we have to work with.

In the comments on feministing recently, Amanda (of Pandagon said, wisely: "However, feminists have to work with the world we've got, not the one we want."
And I think I need to add to that. We have to work with what we've got, yes, but we also have to work toward what we want.

I wish more than anything that political strategy could work by being idealistic. By being all-inclusive all the time and by always employing good feminist, non-essentialist frameworks. And for a while, when I hadn't really left the liberal bastions of New York state and Northampton, Massachusetts, I thought that maybe it could. The people in my hometown, and especially the people here in Northampton, are actually pretty receptive to inclusive policy. But after being in Sioux Falls and Brookings, SD, and seeing "middle America," and actually finally experiencing people who may not think the way I do and may not have been raised the way I was...I've realized that can't happen. We can't have the perfect, all-inclusive strategy and actually be successful. We can work toward it, but we can't use it, not in the current political environment. Even with the huge gains the Dems, and women, and even queers (in AZ at least, kinda) made on November 7th this year, employing that kind of strategy would be asking to lose. Pushing the envelope is important. If you don't push the envelope, you don't get change. But over-pushing it causes severe backlash, and quite possibly sets you back further than you were when you started.


Something they don't teach you in school, even in women's studies or explicitly feminist academia, something incredibly disheartening:
In making and reading and analyzing theory, and even theorizing about political strategy, we can be inclusive and non-essentialist. We can be "good feminists."
But in strategizing and in political action, we can't be.


We've got to work toward the world we want, but we'll never get that world unless we work with the one we've got.

Ireland and Women's Rights

For a long time now, Ireland has been seriously lagging behind the rest of Western Europe in regards to women's and reproductive rights. I'm inclined to believe this seemingly out-of-place oppressive ban in Ireland is probably due to the overwhelmingly Catholic population, but despite their Catholicism, recent polls have shown that the majority of Irish people are pro-choice.

The Irish Family Planning Association has been mighty busy lately, trying to get Ireland out of the repro rights doghouse, so to speak. That fact in itself is perhaps not so noteworthy, although it's fabulous. What I love most about this is their strategy. A strategy which we seriously need to start thinking about here in the U.S. (even if it is currently not so feasible due to the U.S. being a collective jackass).

The IFPA is tackling the abortion ban from a human rights standpoint, arguing that the denial of access to abortion is a violation of the human rights agreement (the European Convention on Human Rights) that the Irish government has signed. They have filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the Convention, arguing the following:

Ireland's restrictive abortion law violates their human rights on four grounds protected by the convention:
"the right to privacy in all family, home and personal interests, and entitlement to no public interference from any public authority in exercising this right;
the right to be free from inhuman or degrading treatment;
the right to protection of the law to safe-guard the life of an individual";
and the provision that affords
"rights and freedoms without discrimination on any grounds.

(via PPFA's choice! magazine)




Too bad the U.S. doesn't really believe in human rights and such....

SD abortion ban signed into law

I hate this man right now:



Today, at about 2pm, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed the abortion ban into law.

It wasn't unexpected, but still no less disappointing.
It won't go into effect until July 1st, but a federal judge will probably issue an injunction on its enforcement until it goes through the court system. All the way to the Supreme Court. Which now most likely has enough anti-choice old white men (plus Clarence Thomas) to overturn Roe.

Oh, it's a bad day for women and their reproductive autonomy, or what was left of it. A bad, bad day.

Planned Parenthood's press release.
To donate to Planned Parenthood to help cover the costs of the lawsuit they'll be filing post-haste: go here.

quick mini-roundup, pro-choice style

I definitely do not have time to blog about everything that needs blogging about, since I have lots of papers and reading to do, but a little baby (no pun intended) pro-choice/anti-choice link dump:

1. Wal-Mart has agreed to sell EC at ALL of its pharmacies. Of course, it includes one of those "conscientious objection" clauses, so that if anti-choice pharmacists decide that they don't "believe" in dispensing EC, they can send the woman away. Which is awful, and especially a problem in most of the more rural parts of America, where that specific Wal Mart pharmacy might be the only one within a reasonable distance.
But it's a start.
(The official concession on the WalMart website.)

2. South Dakota is now only one among many with proposed legislation that would criminalize and ban abortion.
State Sen. Jason Crowell proposed an abortion ban in Missouri this week.
State Rep. Steve Holland proposed an abortion ban in Mississippi this week as well.
(The South Dakota ban is still waiting to be signed by the governor...and I highly doubt he'll veto, so it's just a matter of time.)

3. In other anti-choice news, Tennessee is considering legislation that would require women to inform and receive consent from he who dispensed the sperm into her vagina that got her pregnant before she receives an abortion.
*sigh*
At least it's not an all-out ban. Yet.

4. There's legislation pending in my home state (New York) that seems almost sorta kinda like a good thing. The good is that it would allow pharmacies to dispense EC over the counter:

The amended legislation would allow pharmacists to dispense only a single dose at a time and only to women. Information about sexually transmitted diseases would also be made available and prescriptions could only be dispensed within the same county as the patient's residence. It does not set age limits.

(The good = italics, the bad = bold)
However, the "same county" thing is such a setback in an otherwise good piece of legislation, because there are A TON of counties in NY state whose only pharmacy is Wal Mart. Even though Wal Mart did just concede and will carry EC, there's no guarantee that they'll actually dispense it OTC if women need it. And then they'd be pretty much screwed, 'cause they can't leave the county (provided they had the resources to cross county lines to get the drug, that is, which is also a problematic assumption, but at least it'd be something).

5. The most frightening post amidst this recent rush of anti-choice legislation comes from Molly, in the form of a do-it-yourself abortion manual, based on techniques that Jane (an amazing Chicago-based group that provided [illegal] abortions in the pre-Roe days) used way back when. As unsafe as most illegal abortions were, Jane only lost one patient out of 13,000, which Molly points out is a lower rate than that of actually giving birth. While it's wicked scary that this information may soon be necessary in South Dakota (and Missouri, and Mississippi...), I'm really glad that the information is being made available. Because, legal or not, women will get abortions. Maybe if they have information like this, there'll be less unnecessary deaths because of this kind of anti-choice, and anti-woman, legislation.

oh no...

(via culturekitchen)


The women of South Dakota have just been screwed by their legislature.

I wrote before about how a bill was making its way through the legislation that would ban abortion in the state.

Yesterday, the SD Senate passed the bill that the House passed a couple weeks ago. They changed the language slightly, but not in a way that changed the purpose and scope of the bill. Because of the language change, though, it had to go back to the House for re-authorization.

Today, the SD House passed the bill again, by a vote of 50-18. (The Senate passed it 23-12 yesterday.)

Now, the only potential obstacle to the legislation is the (anti-choice, Republican) governor, Mike Rounds. And he's not looking to be much of an obstacle, since he's already said that he's inclined to sign the bill.

This is absolutely terrifying.

My guess for how this will go over when it makes it to the Supreme Court (which it will, since Planned Parenthood has already pledged to sue as soon as the Governor signs it):
5-4. In favour of the ban. Overturning Roe v. Wade.
My prediction for the majority: Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy
The minority: Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, Breyer


Something even more frightening? Molly is posting about how to perform an abortion if when Roe is overturned. *sigh*


Jill at Feministe is slightly optimistic, in a weird way:

And so what Molly has posted could be potentially helpful to a lot of women, which is why I link to it. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the post, or the safety of the procedures described therein. But I trust other feminist, pro-choice women. We will create communities, and we will help each other, even if our government finds it acceptable to infringe on our most basic human rights to decide what does and doesn’t grow in our bodies. We did it before Roe, and we’ll do it after.

(Mikhaela's newest pro-choice cartoon)

more on the Wal-Mart/Massachusetts EC controversy

The Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy declared today that Wal-Mart must stock (and, presumably, dispense, although I realize that making presumptions is dangerous when it comes to places like Wal-Mart) EC at all its pharmacies state-wide. (Also in The Boston Globe)

The Board reviewed the state law requiring all pharmacies to dispense "commonly prescribed medications in accordance with the usual needs of the community," and decided that, yes, EC did fall into this category.

Small victories make my heart happy on this otherwise Bleak Day known as Valentine's Day.