Dear friends and readers,
I’ve noticed in mainstream media the determination to de-fund Planned Parenthood has not been treated with any clarity or truthfulness. What has been repeated is the mantra of the Republican group refusing to sign the budget is the objection to Planned Parenthood is they support abortion and do abortions. The reality is a tiny percentage of Planned Parenthood’s efforts are about abortion (different figures are quoted, one that’s repeated is 3%).
The real animus against Planned Parenthood is they enable women to have sex without getting pregnant. The whole thrust of the organization (as seen in its name) is to spread contraception, to give women control of their bodies — and inexpensively. It’s a legacy of Margaret Sanger. The real objection of the republicans is such places enable women to have sex without anxiety.
IN the 1970s I went to Planned Parenthood to be fitted for a diaphragm and while there I had a health assessment exam and pills for menopausal pain. One of my daughters went there in the later 1990s. She wanted contraception, and chose the birth control pill. She also got pills to help her with nervous anxiety and saw a psychologist regularly for about a year.
Why in the mainstream media is the false presentations about abortion and Planned Parenthood repeated. Whose interest is it to prevent women from having sex unless they are threatened by pregnancy? Whose interest is served by not telling the truth here? Can it still be that men measure their manliness by their ability to control women’s sexuality? Husbands have to pay the costs of having children. Who is afraid to say aloud that women should have access to contraception? that women should have equal access to sexual enjoyment as men?
I omit the general health care that Planned Parenthood provides as that’s not the apparent target here, though their price and inclusionary policies also free women of authorities in their lives, the need to have money or connections.
I’ve not written many political blogs since the Admiral and I opened “Ellen and Jim have a blog, two,” but the recent self-serving, ludicrous, and pettily triumphant theatrics over closing down the US government included one vignette, one photo I also want to record…
At about 1 in the morning on Friday night I saw a glimpse of one of the leading women from Planned Parenthood. She looked terrible, her face so harrowed like someone aged 10 years in the last hour, careworn, her shattered held-together guarded expression indescribable. Imagine what they have been going through: the whole nation held up (countless individuals threatened with going broke) because, you see, of these evil women. It’s not a coincidence, that this is an organization dominated by women.
Ellen
By Katha Pollitt at the Nation online:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159817/budget-stalemate-not-about-abortion
E.M.
Myself I think that because it has been religious groups in the US that have worked hard and successful to redefine pregnancy and abortion so that now many women really do believe that upon conception they have a baby in them or what amounts to a baby (by the use of machines which multiply a thousand-fold a heart-beat or fuzzy image), I say that because it has been religious groups at work here that has led to the budget stalemate we have had in congress being said to be about abortion. Religious groups and organizations serve the patriarchy and persuade women that they are not valuable in and of themselves, do not have the right to choose their own way of life. They are anti-liberty.
This is from a debate on WMST-l: It seems to me that what is happening when one talks of spiritual or religious feminists is one misses what the women’s movements have been and continue to be about. Liberty and self-worth, choosing the kind of life the woman wants to lead by herself, on her own, and all the things that go into enabling her to live that life she wants.
Certainly maybe all political movements in order to spread widely have to take on board aspects of the participants’ identity or they will not be able to create organizations others will join. An important part of some people’s identity is their religious belief. When you study the spread of various socialisms and fascisms in Europe in the 1930s you find the groups open community centers, offer baby-sitting and other services, have community nights’ of various sorts. But that is not what the political movement is about. It’s extraneous and can also be a contradiction: human reality is shot through with contradiction.
The point of the feminist movement is to free women from social and sexual, economic and political oppression. If people need to take on board aspects of cultural belief which enable women to argue for themselves they have value or worth (for central to women’s oppression is the belief they are inferior, not as valuable as men), then by all means take on board religious rationales. But don’t lose sight that the rationale is there for another purpose, not for the religion’s sake but for the sake of the liberty and self-valuing. E.M.
Joan Mazza: here’s where our tax dollars go, 10K per second:
http://costofwar.com/en/
Ellen: I don’t want to burden the WMST-L list, but I feel I have to respond. As a Quaker (Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott), I know that religion has also liberated women. Living in the Bible belt and teaching at a Southern Baptist university as I do (and having been denied a promotion in part because I had attended a pro-choice rally and the dean “would not want to give me a soapbox for my political beliefs), I know first hand what you’re talking about. But on the other hand, Quakers, Unitarians, Catholic women, and even some local Baptists have done much to work for social and economic justice for others and they are the ones who energize and persuade many, many women who would not otherwise listen to feminists. We evidently have very different life experiences; mine (I’m 67 and have been in the feminist movement from the 1960′s in a place where I’ve often been isolated) has been energized by religion at the same time it has been frustrated by religion. As a universalist Quaker, I also see that spiritual energy and strength is important, but would not insist on that for secular feminists.
Peace,
Nancy
I hear Nancy. We certainly have common ground in knowing isolation — and I’ve had no promotions whatsoever. My life experience until 33 was NYC (with 2 years in the UK) and since then in Virginia.
My experience of religious people has been that for the most part they are as a result of religious training repressed when they have liberal impulses (using the word in its most fundamental way) and overtly rationalized when they go about to oppress and exclude others. I have met people who are religious who are good and grant that groups like the Quakers are exceptional. But I take the individuals to be acting out of their character and making their religion a function of their character which is profoundly decent.
Ellen
Apparently, the word “uterus” isn’t up to standards of decorum in the Florida House of Representatives even during a debate about the legality of abortion. The invisibility that this kind of censure hopes to effect is staggering. I feel so frustrated and overwhelmed with the layers of disgust for women’s bodies that accumulate within the rhetoric and stances of those politicians who call themselves “pro-life”.
http://incorporatemyuterus.com/cant-say-uterus/
Lisa
Bravo, Ellen. When are the Vatican and the GOP going to realize that if you hate abortion, contraception is your best friend? We ought to be handing out condoms on street corners, and parachuting boxes of them into AIDS-ridden Africa.
Gail White
They – church/repubs/etc. – are against contraception because the woman then is in control and not male power. It isn’t only abortion they hate, but women. Especially women who choose to control their own bodies. This isn’t a logical argument. Christina Pacosz
Same old same old eh?
[...] of a woman’s body and a man’s ability to support her and the family that would result: The woman from Planned Parenthood: what is hated is a woman’s access to contraception: I’ve noticed in mainstream media the determination to de-fund Planned Parenthood has not been [...]