scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

For more information on my why I am considering this, please see this post over at “Keep Your Boehner Out of My Uterus.”

6 weeks or so ago, I trained with my local abortion fund – The Lilith Fund – so that I could volunteer to help out with their hotline.

According to the National Network of Abortion Funds, this what abortion funds are:

Abortion funds are groups of people who help women pay for their abortions.

Nearly all abortion funds are grassroots organizations that work directly with women and families who face obstacles to abortion. Funds help women to pay for an abortion and for travel to a clinic or for an overnight stay in a motel near a clinic. Some funds provide a place to stay in their own homes for women who have to travel a great distance. Many funds also help women to pay for contraception and the morning after pill.

Abortion funds are often women’s only allies as they try to raise money to pay for an abortion.

They are also at the forefront of a dynamic and growing movement that honors the leadership and voices of low-income women, young women, and women of color.

[NB: more people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care]

Lilith Fund helps low-income Texans from Waco south (there is a north Texas abortion fund: Texas Equal Access Fund).

How the hotline works: it is open three mornings a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). During the line’s open hours, people who need help funding their abortion call and leave messages giving basic information. A volunteer then transcribes that information into a document. That afternoon/evening, whatever volunteer is on duty, looks at the list and determines who to call first. You have a set amount of money per day (right now it is $880) that you can give out at your discretion. Most people’s abortion costs around $450 but go up from there. You get 20 to 25 people who call each day. $880 is NOT nearly enough to cover everyone who needs help. On average, each person the LF helps gets $75.

I was nervous about volunteering for the hotline. I was nervous about being responsible for dividing up the money (or, rather, turning people down). I was nervous about listening to and having to react in real time to people’s difficult situations. I assumed that it would be too much emotionally for me to handle.

I was wrong.

Yes, the stories are hard sometimes and making decisions regarding who to fund is stressful. But these things are balanced by (or even utterly destroyed by) the power of a single person saying, “Thank you” six times over, happy that anyone cares about their situation, relieved to receive help without judgement.

I have now volunteered twice with Lilith Fund and I can say two definitive things about it:

1. Even if you think you understand what limited resources and difficult access to abortion care means on the ground, until it either happens to you or you spend time talking to people to whom it affects, YOU DON’T KNOW.
2. Helping people get the abortions they want or need has been the most life-affirming thing I have done in a very long time. It has changed my life.

If you can, you should volunteer with your local abortion fund and/or donate. Find a list of abortion funds here.

I’m going to spend the rest of this post re-telling some of the stories that I have heard in the two (only TWO) hotline sessions that I have done. I hope to make this an on-going series as I volunteer each month with Lilith Fund.

These stories are important. These people are real. Their struggles are real. Their needs matter. 

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[Originally in this spot I had stories from people I talked to while working the hotline. A good friend of mine whom I respect more than almost anyone else in my life contacted me because they felt uncomfortable with me telling other people's stories. While I did get permission from people who work at Lilith Fund to publish these stories, I admit that I was initially hesitant. I do want to tell these stories and we need to tell abortion stories more often, especially the stories of people who are so rarely heard from or are not given space to talk about their experiences. But I'm feeling uncomfortable with my decision and for now, possibly forever, I've removed them.]

Donate to Lilith Fund here.

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UPDATE, May 16: I’m not going to be adding the stories back. At least not for a long while. And if I do, not in the same form. What I will definitely be doing, though, is writing a lot about the ethics of storytelling, which is now my brain’s main obsession.

But I do want to pull out some of the lessons I have learned thus far:

• An often-repeated lesson while working the hotline: you don’t know ANYTHING about people and the situations they face and why they make the choices they do. Calm demeanors do not indicate ambivalence or easy pasts or sanitized backgrounds.
• The Hyde amendment is the devil’s work. Medicaid does not cover abortions. Why? The Hyde Amendment:
  

  This provision, prohibiting federal Medicaid coverage of abortion in almost all circumstances, was the beginning of the anti-abortion movement’s post-Roe, all-out effort to ban abortion. It was a gateway bill, opening the door to the flood of restrictions which today constrict a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, forcing women to “choose” between paying for other basic necessities and having an abortion, and, in too many cases, making abortion impossible. It became the precedent for all other denials of abortion funding, and reinforces our discriminatory, two-tier health care system in which people without financial resources cannot get the care they need.

  Without this 35-year old law, many people would already have the means to access the abortion they need without having to go through an abortion fund.

• It’s very common that people calling LF were using contraception when they got pregnant. Contraception fails to work all the time.
• There are times when LF literally saves people lives by helping them get the medical care they *need* for survival. When you volunteer with an abortion fund, you can help save people’s lives.

Cross-posted from my reproductive rights blog, KYBOOMU.

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From The Maddow Blog:

Mississippi State Representative Bubba Carpenter, speaking to the Alcorn County GOP on Thursday, said as much:

“We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…

“It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to—  Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That’s what we’ve learned over and over and over.’

“But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.”

Garland Grey recently wrote:

I think one of the most important things we could do is to continually find ways to make pro-choice people proud and forthright about their beliefs, to puff them up with moral superiority and FACTS and send them out into the world with the conviction that abortion isn’t shameful, not even a little, that supporting abortion is not merely the right thing to do but opposing abortion is morally obscene, and that anyone who questions these two premises is more invested in self-righteousness than they are in human lives. I think if we could drain the residual shame from the movement and create activists who aren’t simply pro-choice but who understand that being “pro-life” is a symptom of not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about and not giving a damn as long as you can think of yourself as morally superior, we could move this fight toward a decisive victory.

What Bubba Carpenter says here, that it doesn’t matter if people seeking abortions die because forcing people into unsafe abortions is a winning MORAL position, shows how completely morally-corrupt the anti-choice position actually is. Bubba Carpenter is “pro-life”, via Garland’s on-spot definition, because he doesn’t give a damn about any actual people. Carpenter sees himself as morally superior to every person who has gotten an abortion or will ever get one. It’s hard to see the humanity in others when you are looking down at them from so far up on high.

Bubba Carpenter and the “morality” that he represents are truly disgusting. And there is nothing – NOTHING – pro-life about it.

My friend and the wonderful writer, Avital Norman Nathman, profiled my reproductive rights blog, Keep Your Boehner Out of my Uterus, for a series she is doing at Ms. Magazine’s blog titled, “The Femisphere.”

I am beyond honored to be profiled in such a space and feel lucky that I got the chance to discuss a few topics in the reproductive rights movement that are very important to me. An excerpt:

And I will admit–have admitted multiple times on KYBOOMU–that until I got onto Tumblr, I had never even considered how the language of the movement works to create insider/outsider groups, even if the laws and culture we are fighting have an impact on more than just cis women.

Over time, my language has evolved. Most of the time it is just me writing a note at the end of a blog post (either reblogging someone else’s commentary or linking to a post on another website) that reads “NB: More people than just cis women are affected by these laws.” Something simple.

I have had MAJOR arguments with other pro-choice advocates over my desire to be inclusive. I used to lose 20 followers whenever I would fight for inclusivity. That doesn’t really happen anymore. I have had many trans* people thank me for the inclusivity, though I don’t feel that I should be thanked. It should just be how we talk about reproductive rights. I have had other people tell me that they themselves try to be more inclusive now (including John Darnielle, lead singer of The Mountain Goats, who follows KYBOOMU on Twitter and actually reads the things I write).

The profile is accompanied by my most favorite image from the blog, of Boehner in a uterus, that my friend, Cory Tobin, created for me right as the blog was taking off in March 2011. Since my blog was anonymous for a long, long time, Cory never received any public credit for this masterpiece. It’s time to start correcting that!

My favorite thing about the piece is the list of other reproductive rights blogs (and names of some specific bloggers), many of whom I suggested:

• Team Uterati, founded in 2012 by Imani Gandy (Angry Black Lady), aims to provide comprehensive up-to-date information about anti-choice, anti-women’s health and anti-reproductive rights legislative measures in various states. Gandy started Team Uterati as a “community-based organizing tool for feminists fighting for equal rights and reproductive justice.” The project, which is the first of its kind on the Internet, also contains a continually growing Wiki with resources, articles, databases and a forum.
• Abortion Gang: Abortion Gang’s website says it best: “We are unapologetic activists for reproductive justice.” The site discusses reproductive health and justice, and reminds us again and again that the personal truly is political.
• Bebinn: A collection of pro-choice information, rants and unrelated gifs, “for all your pro-choice needs!”
• Care2: An array of comprehensive coverage under the heading “Dispatches from the War on Women.”
• Huffington Post – Laura Bassett: HuffPo’s politics writer tackles both state and national reproductive rights news in a concise, easy-to-understand fashion.
• Prolonged Eye Contact: With articles and commentary on abortion and reproductive rights, this site, according to Jessica Luther, “is REALLY phenomenal at being inclusive in how they talk about repro rights.”
• Rabble: “Radically pro-choice” site that offers the tagline, “It’s pro-choice or NO choice.”
• Radical Doula: Almost defying categorization, Radical Doula is site run by activist Miriam Zoila Pérez, and connects the dots between reproductive rights, birth activism, doula work, LGBT issues, immigrant rights and racial justice.
• Reproductive Rights Prof Blog: This website keeps tabs on reproductive rights issues from legal and academic perspectives.
• RH Reality Check: The one-stop shop for breaking news and opinion on sexual and reproductive health and rights, with updates throughout the day.
• Shakesville: At Melissa McEwan’s one-stop shop for progressive and feminist news, bloggers Misty Clifton and Shark Fu have done a great job of keeping the Shakesville community informed and aware of various reproductive rights news.

Thank you, Avital and Ms. Magazine for this.

Today at Slate, Amanda Marcotte wrote about why it’s a good thing that Nancy Keenan has decided to step down as president of NARAL in order to open up leadership to younger people:

Lamenting the dominance of what Keenan calls the “postmenopausal militia” is to the pro-choice movement like lamenting the filibuster is to electoral politics. Everyone sees it as a problem and hates it, but no one really knows what to do about it. While it’s an easy problem to personalize, the reality is that it’s a structural issue. When the abortion-rights movement was young and grassroots-y, it made sense that young people took the leadership positions. Once it became institutionalized, however, it meant that it had to work by the same rules of the nonprofit world, which is similiar to the business world. You spend your youth gradually working up the food chain, and by the time you reach a leadership role, you’re middle-aged.

I agree with Marcotte’s overall assessment in this piece and I certainly think that one of the problems with the movement is how often young people are not taken seriously.

What struck me in reading this, though, is who Marcotte points to as the younger generation: Sandra Fluke:

Any doubts that a young woman speaking out prominently on these issues carries weight were likely put to rest after Sandra Fluke testified for a special Congressional hearing about contraception access. Yes, she was derided as a “slut” and has to endure having her sexuality questioned on a near daily basis, but that’s the point. Having a woman of reproductive age speaking about reproductive rights in the national eye is galvanizing and powerful. Her likely fertility shouldn’t matter, but because since fertility is the issue, it does.

While I understand that this is a short post with limited space and while I also respect Sandra Fluke more than I can put into words, I find the narrative around her problematic. Because, honestly, the reason she was 1) given space to present her testimony, 2) thrust into the national spotlight, 3) quickly protected by the left at large after being called a “slut” was not simply that she was a young woman who spoke out prominently. It was because she was a young, white woman.

And when looking at Marcotte’s piece about structural problems within the leadership of pro-choice organizations (and the movement at large), it is striking that the people mentioned in this piece (Keenan, Fluke, Jessica Valenti) and the author herself are all white.

The way racism functions in this society and with the long, long history of the sexualization of black women’s bodies, any young black woman who puts herself out there to defend bodily autonomy, choice, and consent is going to be called a “slut.” And yet those same forces that make her especially susceptible to these kind of sexualized charges keep us all from rallying around her, protecting her, thrusting her forward as the example of the bravery and courage and leadership of the youth in our movement.

So, while I agree with Marcotte and Keenan that the leadership of the major organizations in the reproductive rights movement needs to allow more space for younger people, it also needs to be much more diverse.

In a chat with Garland Grey that was published at Tiger Beatdown this week, I wrote the following about the phrase “The War on Women”:

I feel that even the idea that intersectionality dilutes our message is false and plays into conservative beliefs about how the world works. When we use the language of “war on women” because it is politically expedient in talking to conservatives about these issues at the expense of denying the existence and struggle of trans* and non-binary people, what social justice activism are we actually doing? And why are we watering down the reality and lived experience of other people in order to make conservatives feel more comfortable in this conversation? I can’t get behind the “War on Women” because that is simply too narrow a term for who is actually being affected.

This is only one of the reasons I dislike ” war on women”.

After chatting with The Opinioness on Twitter about this phrase earlier this week and how much I don’t like it, I felt like I needed to finally write down somewhere all my many thoughts about this. (All of these feelings were heightened just last weekend because of the many rallies across the US under the title “The War on Women.” I attended the one here in Austin.)

There are three main points:

1. WOW is cissexist and erases the lived realities of plenty of people.
2. WOW flattens all people affected by anti-choice measures into a single, equal category despite HUGE differences in how the so-called WOW affects people based on race, class, etc.
3. WOW makes this seem like this is an issue that is just about the ladies.

Read the rest of this entry »

I went with THE amazing Garland Grey (who I feel endlessly lucky to call a friend – we lunch) to a panel at the University of Texas hosted by the Texas Observer about the rollbacks to reproductive rights (driven by the response to their latest issue, which has, perhaps, the best cover ever on a magazine).

We had thoughts. Garland asked me to chat with him about them. We did. He published them at Tiger Beatdown (YES – TIGER BEATDOWN. I’m on Tiger Beatdown today. I’m trying not to swoon and I’m dangerously close to failing).

Here’s my favorite part (emphasis mine):

GARLAND: I know that you have a personal distaste for the “war on women” language that was flying around the room that evening, with one woman raising her hand to praise the language based on hearing a Republican strategist comment on how effective it was. It seemed like it underscored the false dichotomy of that earlier statement: we can either care about everyone or we can win. Which totally worked for the 2nd wave because here we are, in this gender utopia.

JESSICA: Even the woman who spoke about the importance of intersectionality spent a fair amount of time praising the term “war on women,” which is a term that actively excludes people who aren’t cis women but are just as (or more so) deeply affected by anti-choice legislation and ideas. I was glad that there was discussion about doing intersectional social justice activism (in this case, specifically in reproductive rights movement) without diluting the message. Yet, I feel that even the idea that intersectionality dilutes our message is false and plays into conservative beliefs about how the world works. When we use the language of “war on women” because it is politically expedient in talking to conservatives about these issues at the expense of denying the existence and struggle of trans* and non-binary people, what social justice activism are we actually doing? And why are we watering down the reality and lived experience of other people in order to make conservatives feel more comfortable in this conversation? I can’t get behind the “War on Women” because that is simply too narrow a term for who is actually being affected. But I’m also not sure how to talk about this at a local meeting about reproductive rights rollbacks.

I love the whole damn thing. Thanks, Garland.

Also, in the piece I talk about a post at my blog that a friend wrote about her late-term abortion. Here’s a link.

Last week I wrote a post called, “Safe, legal, accessible, affordable, subsidized abortion on demand for whoever needs or wants it for whatever reason.”

Yesterday was the National War on Women rally and I was tweeting under their main hashtag, #UAWOW. The Right, led by Michelle Malkin and Dana Loesch, went after the hashtag, spreading hate and lies and drivel. That, of course, just made me want to tweet more and more pro-choice things on the hashtag. As a result, I got lots of trolls on my account. One, Vinny, clicked through to my blog and found the above blog post.

To show the sort of fantastically terrible rhetoric that is associated with anti-choicers, I have screen shot his comment (I did NOT approve it for the blog because there is no way to TRIGGER WARNING like I am doing right now in this post before blogging it). It is after the jump. TRIGGER WARNING for racism, discussion of The Holocaust, misogyny, elimination-ist language.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a link to my first ever post at Global Comment.

Thank you, Emily Manuel, for giving me this space and this opportunity and for saving me from having to write a title for this post.

I’m running to Book People first chance I get tomorrow to pick up this month’s Texas Observer.