Oklahomans for Reproductive Justice
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crumeniferus CRUMENIFERUS -
lawlols Don't Let 'em Waste Your Time -
sandraholla sex & the ivory tower -
swellshark approximate sunlight
Here is the link where you can see all of the blogs people are writing in honor of Dr. Tiller.
I am working on mine now.
Ohh haaayyy. While Mallory was cuttin up about bowl cuts I took my senior young kid vacay in the NW. I ate lots’o sea boogers, got a little lost, drank something calledHelliCorn, enjoyed super cool weather, and snarled at apathetic Portlanders who made fun of my accent. Basically like any other day.
Y’all know how we feel about outsiders comin in and tellin us how to run our business. It ain’t gonna happen. So when a Congressman from Arizona decided to introduce a 20 week abortion ban, in, um Washington D.C. folks were like ‘betch plz’. Since dude has appointed himself a D.C. legislator, he’s been dubbed “Mayor Franks” and is now beingbombarded with phone calls about the city itself. Like real problems (public transport, garbage issues, etc)-not ones made up in ‘Ol Fetus Franks brain. Protesting with sarcasm is just about my favorite thing ever, besides kazoos.
Would you wear a shirt that says fuck a naughty word on it? For political reasons? To advertise something? I would-depending on my mood.
I am a part of the Choice Project and I could not be happier with my Paragard IUD and the early results and reporting on the study! Hopefully this will lead to more publicity and wider use of long-acting contraceptives. -Pearl
*more than just ciswomen can get pregnant/benefit from the use of contraceptives.
The NYTimes recently ran an article about the high rate of rape on Native American reservations. This statistic has been reported for years, and it’s recently caught the spotlight because of a proposed amendment to the Violence Against Women Act that would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Indian crime suspects. The amendment was passed by the Senate but rejected by the House Republicans.
Now, the NYTimes offers an “objective” passive-voice explanation for the high rate of rapes: “Reasons for the high rate of sexual assaults among American Indians are poorly understood, but explanations include a breakdown in the family structure, a lack of discussion about sexual violence and alcohol abuse.” Of course, the NYTimes cautions against pointing the finger by saying that reasons are “poorly understood.” It then goes on to lay the blame squarely within Native American society—their dysfunctional families, their lack of discussion about sexual violence, their alcoholism. It also sends the misleading message that most rapes are committed by Native American men, that this rape epidemic is mostly native-on-native violence. In reality, 57-58% of the rapes in Oklahoma and Alaska were committed by non-Indians. Figures for other reservations are probably similar.
The idea that the high rate of rapes is somehow intrinsic to Native American society is colonialist and oppressive. It’s the idea that, “apparently Native Americans on reservations love raping their women.” It ignores the structural causes of societal dysfunction and focuses on the symptoms. The NYTimes could have pointed to the poverty on reservations, the underfunding of law enforcement, the long history of genocide (which ended perhaps only in the late 1970s, when Indian women stopped being forcibly sterilized), the use of rape as a tool of terror by White Americans, and the preaching of female inferiority by White missionaries. When the NYTimes ignores these factors and focuses on the current brutalized state of Native American culture, when it lists Indian family dysfunction and Indian alcohol abuse as facts, then the solution is inevitably for White America to assume a paternalistic role. In other words, the description of facts compels a certain outcome. And by telling the story this way, the NYTimes is urging us toward restricting self-governance for Native Americans.
Stories told by the oppressor provide both the pretext for violence and the post hoc justification for it.
In the following paragraph, the NYTimes gives a nod to the perspective of Indian women: “Rape, according to Indian women, has been distressingly common for generations, and they say tribal officials and the federal and state authorities have done little to help halt it, leading to its being significantly underreported.” This competing explanation is not accorded the status of passive-voice objectivity. It is merely the opinion of Indian women. They are the victims and the survivors and the ones who live in fear of rape, but their account is not objective truth. No, that belongs to the New York Times.
Emphasis ours
I’d like to describe Andrea Grimes and this post by using one of her favorite words: BALLER.
RH Reality Check set out to test the WHP’s non-Planned Parenthood provider listings over the past week and found that while initial searches of TexasWomensHealth.org turn up what appear to be hundreds of available providers, many of them don’t provide any kind of contraceptive care, don’t take Medicaid Women’s Health Program clients, or are simply misleading duplicate listings.
In Austin, for example, many WHP clients visit the Downtown Austin Clinic for contraceptives and cancer screenings. What if a resident of the 78702 zip code who formerly relied on Planned Parenthood had to suddenly find a new doctor?
We searched for providers within 30 miles of 78702, which turned up 137 doctors and clinics — initially, a very promising number. But once we weeded out the duplicates, we were left with just 49 individual providers, including those like the Austin Endoscopy Center. When we called to try to make a gynecological appointment there, we were understandably turned down: “This is a colon cancer center,” the operator told us. No women’s health care there.
Several times, locations listed on the Texas WHP website weren’t taking new Medicaid clients, were only taking those within a limited age range, or simply did not accept Medicaid Women’s Health Program patients. The People’s Community Clinic, which serves low-income and uninsured clients, told us they were only taking adolescents or pregnant women—and pregnant women are, by definition, excluded from the WHP.
The Austin Regional Clinic, which has several locations in Austin, looked promising until we were told, repeatedly, that they don’t accept Medicaid WHP clients—neither does the similarly situated Austin Diagnostic Clinic.
Ultimately, we were able to find nine providers within a 30-mile radius of our selected zip code that accepted the WHP and were taking new patients—some could see a patient for an annual exam as soon as the following day. Provided, of course, that clients are able to travel. The Lone Star Circle Of Care, which also focuses on under-served populations, had appointments in neighboring cities.
But for a WHP enrollee who may not have a car or who can’t afford to take a day or a half-day off from work, it may be a matter of having to make the difficult decision of choosing between several hours’ worth of pay—which could mean making rent or buying baby formula—or getting her annual exam.
And if Planned Parenthood is excluded from the WHP in Texas, there’s a good chance that WHP patients wouldn’t have the good luck we had in finding nine available providers if, as a George Washington University study predicts, existing providers simply will not be able to fill in the gaps left by Planned Parenthood.
[NB: More people than just cis women are affected by these draconian changes to the WHP.]
My boyfriend and I like to talk about the kids we’ll have someday. In my mind, they all have Coke-bottle glasses (because they get their optical genes from me) and they have a mop of wavy red hair (because they get Chris’s follicles). They also do Tae-Kwon-Do and look adorable in their little uniforms. And on weekends, we get the family together and play musical instruments. In some versions of this fantasy, we are a touring family band.
I am the youngest person with childbearing abilities in our group of friends, and I am also the only one without children. This makes me nearly free of the worries of what children are like in reality. But I do know now that if my kids are going to be at all like the kids of my friends, I have more bed wetting and writing on the walls with crayons to look forward to than being in a family band. And being confronted with these truths makes it hard for me to dream up the perfect children that I want to have.
I wrote about the case, and the broader trend it represents, here in my new column for RH Reality Check.
This is DAMN GOOD NEWS!!!Bei Bei Shuai finally out on bail after 435 days in jail. #FreeBeiBei
In December 2010, Shuai, then 33 weeks pregnant, was devastated when her boyfriend abandoned her. She left a suicide note saying she intended to take her own and her baby’s life, then ate rat poison.
Friends intervened and took Shuai to the hospital, where, her attorneys said, “she consented to every test and every procedure that she was told would ensure the safety of her baby.”
The baby she named Angel was delivered by C-section on Dec. 31. At first everything seemed to go well, but Angel soon weakened and was taken off life support a few days later “with Ms. Shuai’s consent and died in Ms. Shuai’s arms,” Kettering said.
After the baby died, Shuai suffered another breakdown and remained in the hospital for a month. She recovered and returned to work, but was arrested in March 2011 and charged with murder and attempted feticide. She has been in jail ever since.
Lately I’ve seen people explaining this simply as “it’s a more inclusive term” and leaving it at that. But there’s a reason it’s seen as more inclusive: the asterisk. And that asterisk makes an important change to the meaning.
An asterisk is a wildcard character in computing. It means “in place of this asterisk, what follows can be any number of other characters or nothing”.
Most often it’s used in search functions within documents or for files on a PC. Any time you hit Ctrl+F and don’t choose “search for complete word only”, you’re telling the computer to search for *whateveryoutyped*. In english, you’re searching for (any characters)whateveryoutyped(any characters).
It’s also used frequently in programming for text input form validation using something called regular expressions(which is a mind-bending syntax for a beginner and I recommend not googling it unless you’re big on autodidactism(which you SHOULD google)).
As it relates to trans*, if you were to search for “trans” in a system that defaults to not including wildcards (in other words, you checked “Search for complete word only”), it would only find:
trans
But if you searched trans*, it would recognize:
trans
transgender
transsexual
transportation
transducer
transformation
transhumanYou get the idea.
It started as a somewhat-geeky way of being inclusive of multiple identities at once without listing them individually. For the identities typically included, I think “trans” works pretty well without the asterisk, but for those who do use it, now you know.
(via transawareness)
