Blogging for Choice

Remember when the the Supreme Court made good decisions?

Today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

Thirty-seven years ago, the US Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, recognizing the constitutional right to privacy and a woman’s right to choose. Our supporters, the millions of people we serve, and those who serve them – we are Planned Parenthood, we stand in support of Roe, and we will continue to stand strong in the years ahead. - Planned Parenthood

While in graduate school in Texas, I had the privilege of meeting Sarah Weddington. She argued Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court at the age of 26, because as she told me "no one else would take the case."

As I've said before, living in Texas was part and parcel of my education. Growing up the in San Francisco Bay Area, raised by a feminist mother, and born six years after Roe v. Wade, the right to complete reproductive health was simply part of the fabric of my life. But, that does not mean I took it for granted.

In my experience, it was very clear just what Planned Parenthood and other women's clinics, offered to women and girls. Going to a Catholic college, Planned Parenthood was a place to get treated for a UTI without a lecture on the pre-marital sex you weren't having. It was the place I drove young women who came to the college's Women's Resource Center, because if I wrote down the address or phone number I would be expelled.

Once kicked off your parent's healthcare plan, in the middle of the post dot-com recession, Planned Parenthood was a place to receive basic medical care, your birth control, and your annual pap smear for free (or for the cost of a thankful donation as you left).

Which is why before leaving for Texas I volunteered as a community outreach member for my local affiliate. It was then that I learned just how fragile the necessary services Planned Parenthood provides were, even in California. I also learned how few women knew that they even existed (even outside my Catholic school bubble).

But when I moved to Texas, I truly learned just how hard people are working to strip women of their ability to access basic services.

The first day I volunteered at Planned Parenthood in Austin, the staff asked to see my teal Medical card (the program that allowed me to access services for free in California). You would have thought it was made out of gold. I soon learned why.

When I arrived in Texas, Title X funding had been reduced so only women 18 and under could access services on a sliding scale. Six months later only women under the age of 16 could.

I volunteered in the downtown clinic - the only one that could then accept what few patients could access the sliding scale, but could not provide abortion services. The North clinic could, but only medical abortion. Surgical abortions could only be performed in the South clinic - a feat of community organizing and architecture created after a fierce battle to provide services despite the efforts to make building it nearly impossible.

But, I knew a lot of this going in. I knew that there are counties in Texas without a clinic of any kind for miles, and that the efforts to limit access were immense. What shocked me most was how few young women in Texas knew that services like these even existed anywhere. The UT campus has an amazing women's clinic that provides basic women's healthcare. But once I stepped foot off the campus, whether at work or at Walgreens, I continually found myself, not an abortion counselor, but a biology teacher.

Young women quietly asked me about STI symptoms they were experiencing, not knowing they were an STI. Or they quietly asked me about normal changes in their body that they were sure were a sign that something was wrong - because they had no knowledge of their own anatomy. At 20 or 23 or 28 they had never had a pap smear. These women were not just experiencing a culture that made abortion a bad word. The extremely conservative lawmakers that had not only made women fight to access basic services had also succeeded in keeping them ignorant of their own bodies, thanks to abstinence only education and the pervasive culture that a woman's body was dirty and abnormal.

All of this is to say that the efforts to shut down clinics, make it impossible for them to provide services, difficult for women to actually obtain services, or perpetuate acts of violence against providers for providing a basic medical procedure, are not the only actions taken to strip women of their ability to choose.

The theme of this year's Blog for Choice day is "trust women." But, in order to ensure safe and legal access to abortion, it is not simply enough to trust that women can make the decision to have an abortion or not, to access Plan B or not, to take birth control or not. Denied access to abortion is a symptom of a greater mistrust in women. A mistrust that limits our ability to understand the biology of our own bodies, to know how to keep ourselves healthy and to be able to seek preventive services.

Read more posts as part of Blog for Choice day, here.

Image via PEP.

Thanks Senator Franken

I'd forgotten that you could actually watch CSPAN and not cringe. Thanks to Senator Franken, I remembered that democracy in action can actually be thrilling (though here is a severe trigger warning, Franken telling the story of what Jaime Leigh Jones survived is horrifying):



From Think Progress:

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:

The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.

It passed 68-30.

To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Required

I was in the same room with Ted Kennedy twice.

During the summer of 2000, I was an intern for the Hon. Juanita Millender-McDonald in Washington, DC. As a member of the House, her office was in the Cannon House Office Building, a building which induced excited taking-part-in-democracy-living-within-history chills every time I entered it. The office held four interns (including myself), a receptionist, scheduler, three legislative assistants, a legislative director, a chief-of-staff, and the Member herself. All of these desks were crammed into two rooms about the size of my dorm room at American University, except for the Member, who had an office to herself. I thought the cramped quarters were kind of exciting - Democracy at work, and all.

The house didn't use Congressional Pages for much (at least our office didn't). It was nice to leave the office and explore the halls of Congress and the catacombs beneath it, so whenever something needed to be delivered somewhere the interns would volunteer. One day, our LD asked myself and another intern to deliver a piece of legislation to Kennedy's office since it was about to be considered before the Senate. So, we took the elevator to the basement, walked through the catacombs past 19 year-olds with blazers and loafers that cost more than our tuition and very serious people with wires in their ears, took the tiny subway (only the Senate got one) and then went up to Kennedy's office.

When we entered we tried not to be dumbfounded. There, in all its Federalist glory, was a giant expansive office filled with strong jawed east coasters. And lo and behold, there he was. He came out of his office, said hello to us (besides the looks on our faces, our orange INTERN badges were blazing around our necks), and continued into the hall with a gaggle of suits and pearls.

The second time was when I attended a health care briefing. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what the topic was (I attended A LOT of them) but, Ted Kennedy was there. As he spoke his face became so red that it almost matched the velvet curtains behind him. Sure, this is a family that knows how to enjoy a good cocktail, but it was also because he was so animated about the subject. For a nineteen year-old who had just spent a summer being disillusioned by the players in the "democratic process," it was refreshing.

I am not one to give in to moving eulogies about public figures while denying that they are people - often deeply flawed people. Which is why I was really glad to read Melissa's post:

The terrible bargain we all seem to have made with Teddy is that we overlooked the occasions when he invoked his privilege as a powerful and well-connected man from a prominent family, because of the career he made using that same privilege to try to make the world a better place for the people dealt a different lot.

It could not have been easy to be the only living member of a legacy that everyone expected to change the country, if not the world. But, in many ways he did not rest on the family's laurels. Jezebel put together a list of his legislative accomplishments and it is impressive. Amplify also has the text of Kennedy's speech to the Senate in 1993 on the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act which, sadly, continues to ring true.

So while I won't forget the flaws the public knew about, I am also thankful for work he did.

Pwned!1! - Barney Frank Refuses to Engage the Crazies

Its about damn time. We need to see more members of Congress calling this out for what it is. It is not a conversation. It is not free speech. It should not be engaged.



Crazy: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy, why are you supporting it?

Barney Frank: When you ask me that question, I am gonna revert to my ethnic heritage, and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?...You want me to answer the question? As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is as I said before, it is a tribute to the 1st Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table - I have no interest in doing it.

Thanks to Pandagon for the transcript.

The Military Industial Complex (Bye bye F22)

This week the first crack in the US military industrial complex was started. An overstatement? Maybe. Does it really mean we can start thinking smartly about how and why we have the largest armed forces in the world? Well, yeah lots of people are thinking smartly about it, just probably not Congress. Rachel Maddow gave a pretty awesome overview of what no longer building F22's means:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

As a part of the generation raised on Top Gun, the idea that the F22 is obsolete (both in tactics and technology) is news. It seems the F22 is just as pointless as the volleyball scene:



But, back to business...something else in the Maddow report struck me: when we talk about outsourcing military projects, we aren't just talking about Blackwater and mercenary contractors, we are also talking about companies doing nothing less than holding US tax payers hostage by their (albeit smart) business practices.

It wasn't until I was doing research for my master's thesis that I knew the origin of the term "Military Industrial Complex" and the fact that it was coined by Eisenhower was mind-boggling. As was the realization that American jobs were not always tied up in the creation of weapons and the goods of war. Of course, the world has changed, but it is interesting to think what the dollars and hours spent on something as useless as the F22 could have produced.

If you haven't read or read the speech, here is the text.