Call to Action: Day 4 of the Resistance

The Women's March, which had representation in all seven continents, took place on Saturday, January 21st, to the tune of 3.67 million marchers on the low end and 4.6 million on the high end of estimations. More than one out of every 100 Americans took to the streets to voice their outrage at this incoming administration and voice their determination to fight and resist at every turn. Many people, Drumpf included, voiced their confusion about the necessity of this march. They argued that women already have all the rights and privileges that they could possibly need. What was the point of this march, really?

A bill was recently introduced to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, January 17th. A full four days prior to the march, and yet nobody knew about its existence until yesterday and today. Even now, most people you inform of the existence of this bill are surprised to know that it's there. This bill, titled H.R.586, posits that "human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization." This is why women marched. This is EXACTLY why. Because from the moment Drumpf set foot into the Oval Office, we knew that he and his administration would start decimating reproductive rights as we know them. This bill sets a dangerous precedent for our country, on a number of levels, and needs to be voted down.

If this bill passes into law, it will make abortion access, and very likely contraception, a thing of the past. With life defined as beginning at fertilization, abortion will be criminalized and defined as murder (even though, interestingly enough, when you ask pro-lifers what the punishment should be for women who have abortions, they usually cannot, or will not, give an answer). The "pro-lifers" who believe that contraception terminates pregnancies, some of whom are our political representatives, will look to deny women access to birth control using the language of H.R. 586 as their justification--seeing as "alternative facts" are perfectly acceptable now, the legitimate fact that contraception does not actually terminate pregnancies will not matter. Women's bodily autonomy will be a distant memory, and all the bloodshed from pre-Roe v. Wade will return to our doorsteps, back alleys, and hospital ERs in very short order. This bill will also set a dangerous precedent for women who have wanted pregnancies and are facing a miscarriage, fetal anomaly, or other medical issue that requires an abortion (early or late term). What's to stop Congress from forcing women to carry non-viable pregnancies to term, even if it kills them? What's to stop Congress from criminalizing miscarriages and imprisoning women for something along the lines of "suspected abortion?" What's to stop Congress from ultimately using The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale? 

The reality is that bills like these, laws like these, do not "save babies." They kill women. Women like Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused a life-saving abortion during a miscarriage. Women like all those who died prior to the Roe v. Wade decision--approximately 5,000 women ANNUALLY in the United States--bleeding to death in back-alley abortion clinics and dying of sepsis in hospital emergency rooms from DIY abortions gone wrong. Women who poisoned themselves with whatever they had in their medicine and/or kitchen cabinets rather than go through with an unwanted pregnancy. As I wrote in a previous post, women will have abortions, bills and laws notwithstanding, whether they are safe or not. Whether they are done by a professional or a back-alley "doctor" or the woman herself. These politicians know this. They know. They know that women who do not want to be pregnant will do whatever they have to do in order to no longer be pregnant. They know that women who do not have access to safe, legal abortions generally end up injured or dead. 

But, as I also mentioned in that same previous post, it was never about protecting women's health. Our political representatives who claim to be "pro-life" are fully prepared to ignore (or even condone) the fully preventable deaths of actual living, breathing women, fully prepared to step over the corpses of women in the streets, in order to prove how "pro-life" they are. The fact of the matter is, we have laws in this country that state that we cannot be forced to donate organs, blood, or any other living tissue to another human being, EVEN AFTER WE ARE DEAD, unless our express consent has been given. And yet, somehow, it's perfectly acceptable to force women to give up their bodily autonomy for approximately 40 weeks--from the moment she becomes pregnant, her body is no longer hers. She becomes a mere vessel for the fetus. In many states where abortion access is practically nonexistent, pregnant women literally have fewer rights than corpses do. To say that this is unacceptable is the understatement of the century.

For those of you who have read up to this point, for those of you who are beyond angry, I'm issuing a call to action and I want you to do three things:

1. Contact your House representative and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
2. Contact your Senators and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
3. Read this short story titled "ILU-486". Bookmark it. Read it every day that you feel like you can't fight anymore, because this could very well be our reality if we don't fight back NOW.

If You're Not Pro-Choice, You're Not a Feminist, aka What Pro-Choice Actually Means

[TW forced pregnancy, denial of bodily and sexual autonomy, death, abuse, descriptions of violence, abortion, rape, incest]

I'll repeat myself. If you're not pro-choice, you're not a feminist. True story.

Pro-choice does NOT mean pro-abortion. 

Pro-choice means pro-making contraception (that, NO, you are NOT paying for, you ignorant asshole) cheaper and easier to obtain, so that abortion isn't fucking necessary in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Of course, it's easy to understand how contraception can be considered evil in a society that teaches us that we're not "real women" unless we become mothers. The real evil comes in the form of people who, rather than allowing us freedom of choice, rather than trusting us to make our own decisions about our bodies and our lives, rather than admitting that just because we have uteri doesn't mean that we all want and/or have to become mothers, would rather force us into motherhood, regardless of whether or not we want to be there, because they feel that's where we belong. It's all about controlling women's bodies and lives; if that weren't true, then they wouldn't be fighting to make trans-vaginal ultrasounds a necessity in order for women to have abortions; they wouldn't force waiting periods on us so that we can go home and think about what we're doing, nor would they force us to look at the ultrasound images so that we'll have some glorious revelation about what we're doing (believe me, women seeking an abortion know what pregnancy means: it's why they want an abortion, and 72 hours isn't going to change that); CPCs (Crisis Pregnancy Centers), whose sole purpose is to lie to us and try and emotionally blackmail us and shame us into keeping a pregnancy that we don't want to keep, wouldn't exist.

It means pro-not forcing women to carry a pregnancy to term that she does not want to carry to term, whether that pregnancy came from consensual sex or from rape or incest. If she wants to carry to term, that is HER CHOICE, and nobody is going to force her to abort the pregnancy if she does decide to carry to term. HOWEVER, if she DOES NOT WANT to continue the pregnancy, she should have the choice to end the pregnancy on her own terms, because let's face it, if she's seeking an abortion, she likely didn't get pregnant on her own terms. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy for 40 weeks and endure childbirth is not teaching her the lesson you think it's teaching her; it's not going to teach her to keep her slutty fucking legs closed. It is, however, going to teach her that, the next time she's raped by her abusive partner and is forcibly impregnated in the process, the next time her birth control that her doctor swore up and down would protect her fails, the next time the condom breaks and the pharmacist refuses to give her Plan B and she can't afford the bus trip to the pharmacy in the next town over, the safest place for her to go is a back-alley abortion clinic, the internet black market, or a closet.

On that note, pro-choice also means pro-not forcing women to attempt to self-abort and kill themselves in the process, and instead giving them legal and medically safe options so that they don't DIE. Abortions are going to happen whether or not you approve of them, and whether or not you allow them to remain legal. Making abortion illegal does not save children; it kills women. Listen up, you alleged pro-lifers! WOMEN ARE ALIVE. We are not just uteri on legs, human incubators, or however else you choose to de-humanize us. We are alive. And when you force us into the back-alleys for unlicensed medical practitioners to butcher, when you force us to drink industrial strength vinegar out of desperation, when you force us to use the wire hanger that once held up our prom dress in a frantic attempt to self-abort, causing us to pull out our own intestines, puncture our wombs, give ourselves sepsis, cause us to bleed out, and end our own lives, you are not saving babies; YOU ARE KILLING US.

So I say again, if you are not pro-choice, if you are not willing to treat women like adults, and instead want to treat us like children who need to be told what to do because we can't possibly know what pregnancy means or what abortion is; if you are not willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and trust us to make the best decisions we can for our bodies and our lives; if you would rather watch us die than watch us exercise our right to prevent a pregnancy and end it if our efforts fail, then you are not a feminist.

Birth Control Saved My Academic Career, My Relationships and My Health

[TW for menstrual issues and abortion]

When I first got my period at the age of 12, I was super excited. I was one of the last of my friends to get it and I felt like I was finally a "real woman." (I would, of course, learn later on that one's biological processes do not a "real woman" make, but that's another post for another time!) That excitement soon turned to fear, pain and frustration as month after month, year after year, I dealt with cramps that felt like a vise grip around my abdomen and an extremely heavy flow that lasted for a good five days, with my entire flow lasting about ten days total that eventually culminated in moderate anemia. I finally started taking birth control pills when I was 18 years old in order to control the cramps and the flow, and because of those pills, I was able to get my anemia under control. I truly feel that those pills saved my health, if not my life.

I was also able to get through college without getting pregnant. Yes, that's right folks, not only was I using birth control for medical reasons, but this feminist was also using birth control for exactly what it's supposed to do: prevent pregnancy. I began a relationship with someone not too long after I had started taking the pills, right at the very beginning of college, and it's thanks to those pills that I was able to graduate Magna Cum Laude with a 3.8 GPA and multiple honors in the four years it was supposed to take me to graduate. Thanks to those pills, I was able to focus on my education instead of on whether or not I was pregnant. Thanks to those pills, I didn't have to, and won't have to, miss classes and/or work once a month due to unbearable, blindingly painful cramps, and I will be able to maintain a healthy, stress-free sexual relationship with my current boyfriend and attend graduate school without having to worry about having an abortion or raising a child at the same time. Thanks to those pills, if I ultimately decide never to have children, I won't have to have them anyway.

I'm privileged enough to be able to pay only ten dollars per packet of pills every month, thanks to my insurance, but even that ten dollars adds up. If the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) includes prescription birth control as a preventative health care service that will be covered in full, i.e. without a co-pay or any other out of pocket costs, that's already $120 extra in my pocket every year. If I had had free birth control during college, I would have saved $480 over those four years. For women who are unemployed or underemployed, free birth control can make the difference between forgoing eating in order to afford their pills, thereby preventing an unwanted pregnancy which would put further financial strain on them in one way or another, and being able to eat properly all month. By preventing pregnancy, these women won't have to worry about starving themselves in order to afford the abortion or the costs of raising the resulting child along with any other children they may already have. And with abortion becoming less and less readily available to women, it's imperative to make preventing pregnancy easier and more affordable. As a matter of fact, by making the prevention of pregnancy more affordable for women, it will reduce the need for abortion, as well as make it easier for women with menstrual-related problems to obtain relief. Women do not need to suffer every month just on the basis of being women, and every woman should have the right to prevent pregnancy for as long as she desires.

This is exactly why the HHS needs to include prescription birth control as a preventative health care service that should be covered in its entirety by health insurance plans. If Viagra, the pill that helps provide the erections that help produce children, can be fully covered by health insurance, then prescription birth control, which prevents unwanted pregnancies, helps relieve all sorts of menstrual-related illnesses, shrinks ovarian cysts, etc., should be covered as well. Prescription birth control is one of the most ultimate preventative health care services for women, regardless of whether or not that reason is reproductively or medically related. HHS needs to do right by women and fully cover birth control.

This post is part of the National Women's Law Center and Planned Parenthood's Birth Control Blog Carnival. You can read the rest of the amazing posts at the link!