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How many more examples do we need of the lethal nature of the supposedly “pro-life” position? Let’s clear this up by naming them correctly, for the record, when you hear the term “Pro-life” you need to replace that with “anti-woman forced birth advocate”. Why? Because what forced birthers are about is stripping women of their rights and of their bodily autonomy. Beatriz, like Savita Halappanavar, is being put in mortal peril because where she lives the forced birth brigades ideas are reality, and women really do not have rights.
“The 22-year-old woman suffers from severe and complicated illnesses. Her doctors have told her that she will likely die giving birth, and the unborn child will most likely live only a few hours, but she is prevented by law from having an abortion. “They [the Supreme Court] were not convinced this is the way… they are saying Beatriz is not in danger and she must pursue the natural way of delivery and we must see what happens,” said Mata. “It isn’t just an abortion, it is a necessity,” said Mata, in an earlier interview with CBSNews.com”
Yeah. The all male supreme court has ruled that this woman is not in danger and must continue with birth. Their noble dedication to preserving life is noted.
Beatriz is carrying an anencephalic fetus, which means it has no brain and is only expected to survive at maximum a few hours after birth, even if she carries it to full term. Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it is very dangerous for her to be pregnant. “The doctors are saying it’s very critical because the lupus may be reactivated and if the lupus is reactivated it is very dangerous for her health,” he added. She is now 26-weeks pregnant, and every day it becomes more risky for her to be pregnant and have an abortion at such a late stage.
This is what happens when legislate against women. Women are endangered and their lives are at risk.
According to a 2012 report from the Central American Women’s Network, 628 women have been imprisoned in El Salvador since its anti-abortion law was enacted in 1998. Twenty-four of these women were indicted for “aggravated murder,” after an abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth. “The only way now is to go to the international courts,” said Mata. Meanwhile, Beatriz awaits her fate in hospital, separated from her 14-month old son and her husband. “Everyday, the health of Beatriz is [getting] worse. If they wait another week or two weeks, she will be too feeble to endure the operation,” said Mata.
So because of the religiously inspired pro-life fuckwittery of the Roman Catholic Church (this is what a society where they have tangible influence looks like) it is most likely Beatriz will die.
No rant today – this is too outrageous and too cold for a rant. This is an tragic (because it is preventible) object lesson – women die and are dying because they are denied their reproductive rights and rights to bodily autonomy.
That is all.
Patriarchal Nonsense.
How many more examples do we need to understand that our society is still in love with patriarchy and misogyny? Adria Richards makes a reasonable gesture, calling people out for their crappy remarks, and for her trouble she is fired and gets rape and death threats.
We’re completely ready for the post-feminism society. For-sure. David Futrelle over at Manboobz has the story.
“And so the Internet has found a new woman to hate. Most of you are probably already familiar with the Adria Richards debacle that’s developed over the past several days. If not, Jill at Feministe has a good summary of events:
Adria Richards, formerly of the company SendGrid, was at a tech conference this week when some dudes behind her made a series of inappropriate and sexual jokes. Annoyed by the pervasiveness of misogyny in the tech world, she snapped a photo of them and put in on Twitter with a complaint. One of the conference organizers spoke to the men and they apologized. Totally reasonable! Good response, PyCon. Later, one of the dudes got fired. Instead of getting mad at the company that made the choice to fire him, the internet hordes descended on Adria. She was on the receiving end of rape and death threats. Her address and phone number were published. Her blog and her company’s website came under DDoS attack. Oh and then her company, SendGrid, fired her.
Like Jill, I think firing someone for a “dongle” joke is an overreaction, to say the least. But Richards wasn’t responsible for that; indeed, she told the fired man she hoped his employer would reconsider and take him back.
SendGrid’s firing of Richards is far more problematic. It’s one thing to get in trouble for acting like a sexist boor; it’s quite another to get in trouble for simply pointing out someone else’s problematic behavior. Richards faced a virtual lynch mob for simply documenting an example of the everyday sexism that permeates the tech world; by firing her, SendGrid essentially sided with the mob.
Is “lynch mob” an unfair term to describe those who’ve gone after Richards? No. In this context, the term is sadly apropos, as the target of all this online “activism” is not only female but black – two strikes against her in the minds of many of her, er, “critics,” who attacked her as a “fucking nigger” as well as a “cunt.” (The more genteel racists referred to her derisively as a “diversity hire.”)”
Oh hey they are talking about this on Pharyngula as well – consider this comment:
“I’m just going to go ahead and re-quote what JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness said in #74, because it bears repeating for the folks who keep insisting that Richards brought everything down on herself solely because of how she raised her objections:
Every single day, all damn day women are subjected to this kind of shit and there’s no reason to give “mercy”. We’ve done the “guys please don’t do that”, remember how that turned out? Every fucking day at work, in public, even at home with our friends and families, we’re pressured to be quiet, speak softly, which adheres to that sexist “ladylike” expectation. FUCK THAT.
What is crystal clear in our culture is that IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW A WOMAN RAISES AN OBJECTION. She can be polite, she can say, “guys don’t do that” without even naming or identifying the person she’s talking about in any way, and go on to be incessantly harassed for over a year. Polite objections by women result in the exact same onslaught of violent hate speech, death threats, and rape threats.
So keep on focusing on what Richards did to “bring this on herself.” Just understand that by doing so, YOU are contributing to this culture of misogyny and YOU are part of the problem.”
So before we get any further please take the following piece of helpful advice to heart: Your experiences are not the experiences of others, thus take the time and really listen to what others are saying, before opining on what is going on.
I’m not really into the whole prostitution is what happens between consenting adults argument. I find that it reeks with the notion that the experiences of a lucky few, a sub set of a sub set, somehow overlays what happens to most people who get involved in prostitution; that would be degradation, pain, and suffering. Layer that with helplessness, fear and shame and you have a tried and true recipe for broken human beings.
Prostitution is not okay. It is never okay and thus the topic is set for your Thursday DWR PSA.
Thank you to Buy Fair: Fight Slavery for hosting the video.
One of the cheap rhetorical tricks that forced birth advocates often use is the idea that somehow “Science” (ya know science, that vast shadowy monolithic structure) supports their crappy arguments and thus lends weight to their assault on women and their rights. One of the easiest tells illustrating the rhetorical, rather than scientific vein of this particular argument, is that idea that we have a definite grasp of when “life” begins. Unsurprisingly, the anti-choice position relies on a gross simplification of what the bio-medical position actually is on when life begins. The irony is very rich as fetus fetishists often assign the label of “anti-science” to pro-choice people arguing against them and their misguided campaign for life.
I’m not really a fan of arguing from authority (This introduction is a perspective from an evolutionary biologist, for the record.), but I swear, if see one more out of context reference to a embryology text during an argument, I will practice immediate defenestration of the offender in question.
This next quoted section is from Blazer S, Zimmer EZ (eds):The Embryo: Scientific Discovery and Medical Ethics. Basel, Karger, 2005, pp 1– 20 (ed. minor formatting changes for effect)
”
[…]
This chapter began with the central ethical question of ‘when does life begin?’ The evolutionary answer to this question makes it devoid of ethical
implications concerning the sojourn from conception to birth (although it has other, profound ethical implications). Instead, the evolutionary and
genetic arguments presented in this chapter indicate that a more meaningful ethical question is:
Where do we place ethical thresholds in the continual process of human
individuality?
Biology provides no clear defining event to answer this question because diploid human individuality arises gradually during the mitotic phase of our life cycle and not at fertilization. Perhaps there is no single ethical threshold in dealing with the mitotic continuum and the attendant gradual emergence
of functional genotypes and individual traits. Although modern biology does not provide an answer to the above question, knowing what the question should be and what it should not be is the critical first step in any debate. Thus, modern biology, and particularly evolutionary biology and genetics, can play an important role in the ethical debates concerning the passage from conception to birth.
[…]”
So let the record be set straight that science doesn’t not precisely know when “life” begins and that very possibly it is the wrong question to be asking.
Ah yes, the perennially wrong anti-choice, forced birth lobby loses again, and again and again. You never get to ignore the bodily autonomy of women and this comment from Pharyngula details precisely why.
“I’ll tell you why I hate those hypothetical near-birth abortion scenarios. It’s not that they’re stupid, or that they never happen, or even that there’s a real world problem of them encouraging the antichoicers to think of this nonsense as a real thing. All of which are true, too, and seriously annoying. But [that’s] not why I get the white-hot HATE.
The hate is because the hypothesizer is just so damned keen to find some way, some very very special exceptional circumstance, in which it’s OK to remove my bodily autonomy. It’s very much like asking me when is rape OK.
Never? Really never? Ok, supposing she were the last fertile woman on earth… Or maybe there was a ticking time-bomb nuke and raping this woman would totally prevent it because a secret code has been tattooed on the inside of her vagina by some crazy mad supervillain in invisible ink and only your special semen can reveal the antinuke codes…
Awww c’mon, pretty please, surely there must be ONE situation in which a woman can be reduced to a piece of livestock?
NO. FUCK OFF. IT IS NEVER OK.
Why are you being so meeeeean to me for just asking?
Why are you so damned insistent on finding that one special circumstance when it’s morally OK for you to do something horrific to me? Why is it so unacceptable to you that I have bodily autonomy in all circumstances? NO, there isn’t a circumstance that makes you the rightful owner and master and torturer of me.
Just stop it right now.
Oh and another bit from the same thread.
“On the off-chance that there are any “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of”, I’d like to say the following:
Dear “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of”:
Fuck off.
Wait, I should probably make it a little more clear about what kinds of people I’m talking about, so that they know that this message is for them.
You might be a “I’m pro-choice, BUT I feel the need to qualify this position so that I can cast judgment on women who make choices I don’t approve of” person IF:
1. You think that, in some cases, women need to “take responsibility” for their actions. By this, you mean that women choose to have sex, and therefore they cannot choose NOT to be pregnant as a result of that sex. You think, or at least your attitude displays, that women who choose to have sex, women who choose to have a lot of sex, women who don’t always have safe sex, women who have sex in circumstances that you consider “iffy”, are “sluts”, and therefore need to be “taught” something so that they can mend their slutty, wicked ways.
2. You think that some women make the “right” choice for them, but that other women make the “selfish” choice. By this, you mean that you feel you are qualified to judge the appropriateness of someone else’s decision about a potentially life-changing situation, without actually being that person. A woman who chooses to have an abortion so that she can keep barely feeding her existing children – sad, but the “right” thing to do. A woman who is young, sexually promiscuous (for whatever “promiscuous” means to you), and seems more “care-free” than you think she should be – not sad, well-deserved, and the selfish bitch could use some “settling down”.
3. You think that some women might carry a pregnancy almost to term and then randomly decide to have an abortion. By this, you mean that a woman who has endured eight months, three weeks, six days and twenty-three hours of pregnancy has the potential to be flighty and impulsive enough to demand that someone kill her fetus.
Are we all clear on who I’m talking about now? Yes? Good.
I say again, fuck off.
My cousin nearly died last night. She went into eclampsia, in the last month of her pregnancy. She’s nineteen. She’s not married. She takes drugs. She’s unemployed. She’s had multiple sexual partners in her life.
In short, she is exactly the kind of person that people talk about (but never actually KNOW) when they say, “I’m pro-choice, BUT”.
You think she’s sexually promiscuous. Let me tell you that it’s hard to develop a healthy sexual attitude when your 20-year-old “boyfriend” coerced you into having sex when you were fourteen.
You think she’s irresponsible. Yeah, not having a firm support structure will do that to you. Not being allowed to grieve the death of your mother will do that to you. Being told of your mother’s sudden death due to side-effects of medication and then being told, “Okay, now go do your homework” will do that to you. Having your father emotionally abuse you and practically abandon you will do that to you. Being passed around from extended relative to extended relative, not having a stable home for more than a couple of years will do that to you. Being the youngest child in a family where all of your siblings are living far away, leaving you alone in a small, impossible-to-leave-town will do that to you. Living in a town that is mostly white, while you’re an adopted woman of color, will do that to you (along with all the judgments that go along with the “hypersexuality” of women of color). Having your own mother, before she passed, speak of adopting black children as if they were litters of puppies, will do that do you.
You might even try to seek comfort in bad places. You might accept the friendship of bad people, just so you won’t be alone. You might try to make some of your pain go away by taking drugs.
You might do that.
But you know what? “Sluts” die from pregnancy, too. Drug addicts die from pregnancy, too. Pregnancy is a medical condition. It doesn’t care what your circumstances are. It sure as hell doesn’t mete out “justice” or “punishment” for your actions and decisions. It kills “good” women as well as “bad” women.
But my cousin never had a choice. Not a real choice. She had no money for an abortion. She had no family that would help her if she did. It was all arranged – they would find an adoptive couple, and she would give the baby up. There was no discussion. My cousin didn’t have a say – after all, she brought this on herself, didn’t she? She can’t make choices about what happens to her own body when she depends on other people, can she?
No real choice for her, and she very nearly paid with her life. She started having seizures. The doctors did an emergency C-section (the baby is small, but should be fine) and continued surgery to try to save my cousin’s life. We don’t know yet if she will have brain damage as a result of those seizures.
So, to all of you “I’m pro-choice, BUT”:
Fuck off.
Who’s the one placing a value judgment on human life, here? Is it me (unequivocally pro-choice, abortion on demand)? Or is it you (I’m pro-choice, BUT)?”
And of course, the arguments that forced birth advocates refuse to answer and repeat what about the baaaaabY! Again.
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There are no just wars. The death, the depravity, and destruction should never have pretense of being a noble endeavour. War is like being dragged face first through fifteen kilometres of shit, nobility and honour be damned.
We’re going to look at a “bad” war, that is a war that we did all the things we usually do, but couldn’t manage to spin a victory or even a “Mission Accomplished” out of the briny wash. Vietnam seems to cause soul-searching in the US. The Vietnam War should do that at the barest of minimums. I wonder how much “soul-searching” the Vietnamese do considering it was their country that was systematically raped, poisoned and bombed into a moonscape.
War kills people, like you and like me. Not the Enemy, not the “evildoers” but women, men and children. Families, friends, acquaintances are all maliciously erased by the callous hand of war. The article from Alter.net that excerpts a book by Nick Turse is about the humiliations, gang rapes and murders visited upon the women of Vietnam by the invading American troops. Make no mistake, this happens in every war and is committed by almost every military.
“In 1971, Major Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate who served as regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, testified before members of Congress about the ease with which Americans killed Vietnamese. “Above 90 percent of the Americans with whom I had contact in Vietnam,” said Dr. Livingston, treated the Vietnamese as subhuman and with “nearly universal contempt.” To illustrate his point, Livingston told his listeners about a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids. The pilot was temporarily grounded as the incident was being investigated, and Livingston spoke to him in his medical capacity. He found that the man felt no remorse about the killings and only regretted not receiving his pay during the investigation.”
War makes us forget who we are and what we value. Once we strip the humanity from our enemies, anything becomes possible.
“General George S. Patton III. Son of the famed World War II general of the same name, the younger Patton was known for his bloodthirsty attitude and the macabre souvenirs that he kept, including a Vietnamese skull that sat on his desk. He even carried it around at his end-of- tour farewell party. Of course, Patton was just one of many Americans who collected and displayed Vietnamese body parts.” [..]
Some soldiers hacked the heads off Vietnamese to keep, trade, or exchange for prizes offered by commanders. Many more cut off the ears of their victims, in the hopes that disfiguring the dead would frighten the enemy. Some of these trophies were presented to superiors as gifts or as proof to confirm a body count; others were retained by the “grunts” and worn on necklaces or otherwise displayed. While ears were the most common souvenirs of this type, scalps, penises, noses, breasts, teeth, and fingers were also favored.”
Ah yes, even this very day, we boldly proclaim our civilization and our humanity to all of those who would listen. Can you imagine the rage and indignation of those who have suffered at our hands?
Hypocrisy is flowing from the anti-choice sites like turds from a overfull diaper. The idea that they are somehow committed to the preservation of life is the weapons-grade bullshite that religious thinking actively promotes. The pious f*cks are equating abortion to the recent mass murder at Sandyhook Elementary School.
How dare you?
You (fetus fetishists) purport to have moral standards and then crassly use the murder of children to further your own anti-woman agenda. I’m certainly glad that religion is such a fine moral compass and guide for behaving as a caring empathetic, human beings.
An image repost, but hey its still amazingly relevant.
So stop, just stop with the “what about the baaaaby” whinging and try to clear your addled cotton-filled heads for one microsecond. Promote your toxic anti-female agenda – go to town (usually church) – awesome, we need exemplars to show how incredibly wrong you are.
But don’t use the deaths of innocent people to enhance(?) your attack on women. It is gross and disgusting.
This post magically disappeared. Looks like someone has a shred of decency.
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