How about this? This morning I was listening to an Accessible World
podcast. It was one of their literary discussions and they were
discussing Becoming by Michelle Obama. There was a woman who described
herself as a conservative Republican. She said that she would probably
not have read this book on her own because of that, but that she had
read it for the discussion. She went on to say that she was glad that
she had read it because she learned some things and was surprised by a
lot of things. One of the things she was surprised by was that someone
who was pro-abortion could like children. I note that she kept saying
pro-abortion rather than pro-choice. I don't think I ever met anyone who
was actually pro-abortion. But she said that she did not think it was
even possible that someone who was pro-abortion could actually like
children. I was listening to her voice as she said this and she was not
being the least bit sarcastic. Everything seemed to indicate that she
actually believed this.
---
David Hume
“ In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees
of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral
evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. ”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
On 5/19/2019 10:46 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Where do these people get off at?
They are, to a man...and to a woman, the same people who scream their
opposition to "government interference". They are the self same
people who tearfully applaud as the drums and bugles play, and the
banners fly as the cream of our youth march off to sacrifice their
lives in another of our continuous wars.
They are the same people who gather in their local churches and pray
to a God of Forgiveness, and then demand that any doctor assisting in
a woman's decision to abort a fetus, be sent to prison for 99 years.
How is it that on the one hand we should down size government and
allow people the freedom to conduct their own business, while on the
other hand they want to post officials in every woman's bedroom with
their noses between her legs?
There's only one word which explains it. Insanity!
Carl Jarvis
On 5/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
She omits Hillary who, I remember, in around 2005 or 6, was talking about
abortion being only a last resort and how the Democratic Party should
welcome people who are opposed to abortion and include their voices.
Miriam
Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades as Hysterical
By Rebecca Traister, The Cut
18 May 19
have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who I'm mad
at, what that anger's good for, how what makes me maddest is the way the
madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have relied on it for
their gains.
For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have
watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting
against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And
I have watched as politicians - not just on the right, but members of my
own
party - and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive
rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian
fiction.
This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept
through
states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately reverse Roe at the
Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning of a broad realization
-
a clear, bright, detailed vision of what's at stake, and what's ahead. (If
not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).
As it comes into view, I am of course livid at the Republican Party that
has
been working toward this for decades. These right-wing ghouls - who
fulminate idiotically about how women could still be allowed to get
abortions before they know they are pregnant (Alabama's Clyde Chambliss) or
try to legislate the medically impossible removal of ectopic pregnancy and
reimplantation into the uterus (Ohio's John Becker) - are the stuff of
unimaginably gothic horror. Ever since Roe was decided in 1973,
conservatives have been laboring to roll back abortion access, with
absolutely zero knowlege of or interest in how reproduction works. And all
the while, those who have been trying to sound the alarm have been shooed
off as silly hysterics.
Which is why I am almost as mad at many on the left, theoretically on the
side of reproductive rights and justice, who have refused, somehow, to see
this coming or act aggressively to forestall it. I have no small amount of
rage stored for those in the Democratic Party who have relied on the
engaged
fury of voters committed to reproductive autonomy to elect them, at the
same
time that they have treated the efforts of activists trying to stave off
this future as inconvenient irritants.
This includes, of course, the Democrats (notably Joe Biden) who long
supported the Hyde Amendment, the legislative rider that has barred the use
of federal insurance programs from paying for abortion, making reproductive
health care inaccessible to poor women since 1976. During health-care
reform, Barack Obama referred to Hyde as a "tradition" and questions of
abortion access as "a distraction." I've spent my life listening to
Democrats call abortion a niche issue - and worse, one that is somehow
repellent to voters, even though support for Roe is in fact among the most
broadly popular positions of the Democratic Party; seven in ten Americans
want abortion to remain legal, even in conservative states.
You can try to tell these Democrats this - lots of people have been trying
to tell them for a while now - but it won't matter; they will only explain
to you (a furious person) that they (calm, wise, knowledgeable about
politics) understand that we need a big tent and can't have a litmus test
and please be reasonable: we shouldn't shut anyone out because of a
difference on one issue. (That one issue that we shouldn't shut people out
because of is always abortion). Every single time Democrats come up with a
new strategy to win purple and red areas, it is the same strategy: hey,
let's jettison abortion! (If you object to this, you will be told you are
standing in the way of the greater progressive project).
I grew up in Pennsylvania, governed by anti-abortion Democrat Bob Casey
Sr.;
his son Bob Jr. is Pennsylvania's senior senator now, and though he's
getting better on abortion, Jr. voted, in 2015 and 2018, for 20-week
abortion bans. Maybe my rage stems from being raised with this particularly
grim perspective on Democratic politics: dynasties of white men united in
their dedication to restricting women's bodily autonomy, but they're
Democrats so who else are you going to vote for? Which reminds me of Dan
Lipinski, the virulently anti-abortion Democratic congressman - whose
anti-abortion dad held his seat before him. The current DCCC leader, Cheri
Bustos, is holding a big-dollar fundraiser for Lipinski's reelection
campaign, even though it's 2019 and abortion is being banned and providers
threatened with more jail time than rapists and there is someone else to
vote for: Lipinski is being challenged in a primary by pro-choice
progressive Democrat Marie Newman. And still, Bustos, a powerful woman and
Democratic leader, is helping anti-choice Lipinski keep his seat for an
eighth term. So I've been thinking about that part of my anger too.
Also about how, for years, I've listened to Democratic politicians distance
themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and insisting it should be
rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to be a crucial, legal cornerstone
of comprehensive health care for women, people with uteruses, and their
families. I have seethed as generations of Democrats have argued that if we
could just get past abortion and focus instead on economic issues, we'd be
better off. They never seem to get that abortion is an economic issue, and
that what they think of as economic issues - from wages and health care to
housing and education policy - are at the very heart of the reproductive
justice movement, which understands access to abortion to be one (pivotal!)
part of a far broader set of circumstances that determine if, when, under
what circumstances, and with what resources human beings might have and
raise children.
And no, of course it's not just Democrats I'm mad at. It's the pundits who
approach abortion law as armchair coaches. I can't do better in my fury on
this front than the legal writer Scott Lemieux, who in 2007 wrote a
blistering rundown of all the legal and political wags, including Ben
Wittes
and Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Cohen and William Saletan, then making
arguments, some too cute by half, about how Roe was ultimately bad for
abortion rights and for Democrats. Some like to cite an oft-distorted
opinion put forth by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has said that she wished the
basis on which Roe was decided had included a more robust defense of
women's
equality. Retroactive strategic chin-stroking about Roe is mostly moot,
given the decades of intervening cases and that the fight against abortion
is not about process but about the conviction that women should not control
their own reproduction. It is also true that Ginsburg has been doing the
work of aggressively defending reproductive rights for decades, while these
pundits have treated them as a parlor game. As Lemieux put it then, it was
unsurprising, "given the extent to which affluent men safely ensconced in
liberal urban centers dominate the liberal pundit class," that the
arguments
put forth, "greatly understate or ignore the stark class and geographic
inequites in abortion access that would inevitably manifest themselves in a
post-Roe world."
Or, for that matter, that had already manifested themselves in a Roe world.
Because long before these new bans - which will meet years of legal
challenge before they are enacted - abortion had grown ever less accessible
to segments of America, though not the segments that the affluent men (and
women) who write about and practice politics tend to emerge from. But yes,
thanks to Hyde and the TRAP laws and the closed clinics and the long travel
distances and paucity of providers and the economically untenable waiting
periods, legions of women have already suffered, died, had children against
their will, while columnists and political consultants have bantered about
the necessity of Roe, and litmus tests and big tents. In vast portions of
this country, Roe might as well not exist already.
And still those who are mad about, have been driven mad by, these
injustices
have been told that their fury is baseless, fictional, made of chewing gum
and recycled copies of Our Bodies Ourselves. Last summer, the day before
Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation from the Supreme Court, CNN host
Brian Stelter tweeted, in response to a liberal activist, "We are not 'a
few
steps from The Handmaids' Tale.' I don't think this kind of fear-mongering
helps anybody." When protesters shouted at Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation
hearings a few weeks later, knowing full well what was about to happen and
what it portended for Roe, Senator Ben Sasse condescended and lied to them,
claiming that there have been "screaming protesters saying 'women are going
to die' at every hearing for decades" and suggesting that this response was
a form of "hysteria."
It was the kind of dishonesty - issued from on high, from one of those
Republicans who has inexplicably earned a reputation for being "reasonable"
and "smart," and who has enormous power over our future - that makes you
want to pull the hair from your head and go screaming through the streets
except someone would just tell you you were being hysterical.
And so here we are, the thing is happening and no one can pretend
otherwise;
it is not a game or a drill and those for whom the consequences - long real
for millions whose warnings and peril have gone unheeded - are only now
coming into focus want to know: what can be done?
First, never again let anyone tell you that the fury or determination to
fight on this account is invalid, inappropriate, or inconvenient to a
broader message. Consider that this is also what women and marginalized
people are told all the time about their anger in general: that they should
not express it, not let it out, because to give voice to their rage will
distract from their aims, undermine them; that it will ultimately be bad
for
them. This messaging is strategic. It is designed to get angry people to
keep their mouths shut. Because if they are successfully stifled, they will
remain at the margins, isolated, alone in their fury. It is only if they
start letting it out and acting on it and working in tandem with others who
share their outrage that they might begin to form networks, coalitions, the
building blocks of movements; it is when the anger is let loose that the
organizing happens in earnest.
Second, seek the organizing that is already underway. In the days since
this
new round of state abortion bans have begun to pass and make headlines,
secret Facebook groups have begun to form, in which freshly furious women
have begun to talk of forming networks that would help patients evade
barriers to access. Yet these organizations already exist, are founded and
run by women of color, have long been transporting those in need of
reproductive care to the facilities where they can get it; they are
woefully
underfunded. The trick is not to start something new, but to join forces
with those who have long been angry about reproductive injustice.
"Abortion funds have been sounding the alarm for decades," said Yamani
Hernandez, who runs the National Network or Abortion Funds, which includes
76 local funds in 41 states, each of them helping women who face barriers
getting the abortion care they need, offering money, transportation,
housing, and help with logistics. Only 29 of the funds have paid staff; the
rest are volunteer-run and led with average budget sizes of $75,000,
according to Hernandez, who said that in 2017, 150,000 people called
abortion funds for help - a number up from 100,000 in 2015, thanks to the
barrage of restrictions that have made it so much harder for so many more
people. With just $4 million to work with, the funds were able to help
29,000 of them last year: giving abortion funds money and time will
directly
help people who need it. Distinguishing the work of abortion funds from the
policy fights in state houses and at the capitols, Hernandez said,
"whatever
happens in Washington, and changes in the future, women need to get care
today."
And whatever comes next, she said, it's the people who have been doing this
work for years who are likely to be best prepared to deal with the harm
inflicted, which is a good place for the newly enraged to start. "If and
when Roe is abolished," said Hernandez, "the people who are going to be
getting people to the care they need are those who have largely been
navigating this already and are already well suited for the logistical
challenges."
The fights on the ground might be the most current and urgent in human
terms, but there is also energy to be put into policy fights. In 2015,
California Congresswoman Barbara Lee authored the EACH Woman Act, the first
serious congressional challenge to the Hyde Amendment, which came after
years of agitation and activism, especially by All Above All, a grassroots
organization led by women of color and determined to make abortion
accessible to everyone. Those who are looking for policy fights to lean
into
can call and write your representatives and candidates and demand that they
support the EACH Woman Act.
Rage works. It takes time and numbers and a willingness to express it, but
it is among the most reliable catalysts of social and political change.
That's the story of how grassroots activism can compel Barbara Lee to
compel
her caucus to take on Hyde. Her willingness to tackle it, and the righteous
outrage of those who are driven to end the harm it does to poor women and
women of color, in turn helped to compel Hillary Clinton to come out
against
Hyde in her 2016 primary campaign; opposition to Hyde is now - for the
first
time since it was passed in 1976 - a part of the Democratic Party's
platform.
In these past two years, fury at a Trump administration and at the
Republican Party has driven electoral activism. And at the end of 2018, the
Guttmacher Institute reported that 2018 was the first year since at least
2000 in which the number of state policies enacted to expand or protect
abortion rights and access, and contraceptive access, outnumbered the
number
of state restrictions. Why? Because growing realization of what was at
stake
- and resulting anger and activism, pressure applied to state legislatures
-
led representatives to act.
Of course: vote.
Vote, as they say, as if your life depended on it, because it does, but
more
importantly: other people's lives depend on it. And between voting,
consider
where to aim your anger in ways that will influence election outcomes:
educate yourself about local races and policy proposals, as well as the
history of the reproductive rights and reproductive-justice movements. Get
engaged not just on a presidential level - please God, not just at a
presidential level - but with the fights for state legislative power, in
congressional and senate elections, all of which shape abortion policy and
the judiciary, and the voting rights on which every other kind of freedom
hinges. Knock doors, register voters, give to and volunteer with the
organizations that are working to fight voter suppression and redistricting
and expand the electorate; as well as to those recruiting and training
progressive candidates, especially women and women of color, especially
young and first-time candidates, to run for elected office.
You can also protest, go to rallies. Join a local political group where
your
rage will likely be shared with others.
Above all, do not let defeat or despair take you, and do not let anyone
tell
you that your anger is misplaced or silly or in vain, or that it is
anything
other than urgent and motivating. It may be terrifying - it is terrifying.
But this - the fury and the fight it must fuel - is going to last the rest
of our lives and we must get comfortable using our rage as central to the
work ahead.
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