What does a congressperson from Ohio have in common with a 16 year-old sex worker in Cambodia? They're both symbols of the perverse political stalemate in Washington, D.C., that threatens to set back the struggle for women's equality around the world.
The year that girl was born, a conference of world leaders vowed to eliminate many of the worst forms of gender oppression. Last week, officials and civil society groups convened again at the United Nations to take stock of all the ways the international community has fallen short of its promises on women's health, education and political and economic empowerment. And on Capitol Hill, the GOP is pushing budget cuts that would make sure the promise remains broken.
It's not a coincidence that conservatives in Congress are fighting a two front war on women: attacking women's rights across the Global South and killing Roe v. Wade at home. Conservatives are exploiting the budget process to defund Title X, the primary federal funding vehicle for family planning reproductive health services for women. Cutting these funds would leave many poor women with no local clinic or social service agency to get the guidance they need to make informed choices about sex and pregnancy.
The effort is backed by a slew of state and federal proposals to restrict access to abortion by sadistically redefining "rape" and "fetus" to criminalize women and restrict medical providers. Plus the perennial smear campaigns against Planned Parenthood clinics.
It's on this battlefield that Rep. Bob Latta of Ohio faced off with impoverished teenage girls everywhere by proposing to wipe out funds for international family planning programs.
The proposed cutbacks would deeply hinder efforts to provide women with social supports and medical resources for negotiating sexuality, pregnancy and related health risks. The ripple effects of family planning assistance range far and wide in developing economies. Women who have no choice in when they have children also have no control over their economic destinies, cannot pursue their educational aspirations, and are restricted in their ability to challenge authority--whether in the form of standing up to an abusive husband at home or running for parliament.
Often overlooked is the critical link between maternal health and HIV/AIDS prevention. Family planning services are often the initial point of contact between impoverished women and any form of regular health care. Strong birth control programs help HIV-infected women avoid unwanted pregnancy, reduce mortality risks among infected mothers, and prevent HIV transmission to newborn babies.
Population Action International says that the U.S. support for family planning and reproductive health helps mitigate the worst effects of food crises, environmental degradation, military conflict, and sexually transmitted diseases. Nevertheless, over the past half generation:
U.S. support for international [family planning and reproductive health] has historically been underfunded. The FY 2010 funding level of $648.5 million represents nearly a 25 percent cut (when adjusted for inflation) from what the U.S. spent on these programs in 1995.
Moreover, since 1995 the number of women in the developing world of reproductive age has increased by more than 344 million, thus increasing the need and demand for family planning.
The unmet needs those numbers represent will expand into full-blown crisis under the FY2011 budget resolution Congress is finalizing, a so-called negotiation that is in turn a dress rehearsal for the FY2012 budget debate. Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey noted in the Congressional Record:
According to Population Action International, cutting this funding would result in: 7.8 million more unintended pregnancies; 3.7 million more abortions; 87,000 additional newborn deaths; and 12,000 additional maternal deaths.
If anti-choice conservatives get their way in the budget process, they'll also reinstate the global gag rule, which restricts U.S. funds from being used for family planning clinics. These funds do not, contrary to right-wing propaganda, directly support abortion in foreign countries. Cutting them off simply cuts off many poor women's access to all health care.
The sad irony is that anti-abortion lawmakers should, in theory, be cheering on global family planning support. If fully funded, it would not only save the lives of some 250,000 women at risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth, but also lead to 14.5 million fewer abortions, according to Population Action. Of course, as Jodi Jacobson points out at RH Reality Check, "pro-lifers" in fact care little about the lives of women and children, especially the invisible poor whose lives count for less than a few swing votes in purple districts.
President Obama's budget proposal for 2012 includes a modest boost for family planning funds and other global health programs. But it doesn't come near meeting women's total unmet needs, and will face butchery as it wends through the GOP's budget gauntlet.
All of the tools that women gained over the 20th century to assert sovereignty over their bodies--contraception, abortion, sex education--are getting buried as the U.S. retrenches from its human rights commitments to women at home and abroad.
And so, as the 1995 Beijing Declaration nears its sweet sixteen, a bitter, wrenching power struggle is being waged over the backs of the world's most disenfranchised women. The latest international data from the Guttmacher Institute illustrate the intersection of education, contraception and health: Among women with less than seven years of schooling in those countries, the estimated unmet need for contraception has reached 28 percent in Bolivia, 31 percent in Cambodia, and 36 percent in Lesotho. Not surprisingly, among women aged 15 to 49, about 20 percent of births in Cambodia and 40 percent of births in Lesotho and Bolivia were reported to be "unwanted." The United Nations reports that HIV risk is highest among women and girls with limited access to education and those suffering forms of gender oppression, including rape, early marriage, and childcare burdens.
While the (largely male, white and middle-aged) Congress dithers on spending cuts that amount to a negligible fraction of the country's overall deficit, women face at least another year of deferred promises and crippled hopes. So that Cambodian girl will turn 16 this year, her life spanning the arc of progress that women have seen since Beijing. But the significance of the milestone will likely be lost on her, now that she's left school to work, given birth to a child she doesn't know how to feed and clothe, and learned too late that she's infected with a deadly virus. And likewise, her struggle will never cross the mind of a congressperson from Ohio as he casts his budget vote, unmoved by the fact that his political calculations have just sealed her fate.
Cross-posted from Colorlines.com
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Deepak Chopra: How Men Can Be Wise About Women
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If pregnancy is such a violation of "Bodily Autonomy" how is it legal to be pregnant?
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How can grown people ask this question? Heck, how would even a child need to ask this questions? How can someone not understand the difference between doing something to yourself and having something done to you against your will?
Why does this even need to be explained? Why does it need to be explained every time?
I read about Cargo Cult's once. Primitive people who liked the nifty stuff that came off our planes during the great war and who tried to lure the planes back afterwords by building mock bases. Towers, bamboo radios, landing strips. They'd have priests sit in the towers saying the invocations and chants that radiomen did to call the planes with their wealth of cargo back.
They didn't understand the substance of our technology or society but they copied the form as exactly as they could. It, of course, didn't work because they'd Completely. Missed. The Point.
Are forced birthers like cargo cultists? Are they imitating pregnancy in some primitive rite trying to create the wonder of chosen Motherhood by force?
Or do they honestly not understand the difference between sex and rape? What on earth do they think "Autonomy" means?
Surpluses.
If he'd kept his war mongering and tax breaking in his pants we'd be free and clear right now.
Or can we get you to jump the shark and demand that the government force people to donate kidneys to save them? Obviously horrible but in order to condemn abortion you need to establish **3** things.
1 - That people are entitled to the flesh of another to sustain their own lives.
2 - That the government should be empowered to force citizens to surrender their flesh to the needy.
3 - That fetus's are in fact people and should have the same right to another's flesh that born people have.
Fetal equality simply can't entitle fetus's to something that born people aren't entitled to. And born people aren't entitled to other people's flesh. So in order to be logically consistent you have to either advocate for an expansion of the rights of born people that would fundamentally change our society into something monstrous or admit to really being an advocate of fetal superiority/maternal inferiority.
Either one of which makes the headline a completely accurate description of your position.
It is only necessary to re-humanize the unborn in order to condemn abortion.
According to Justice Blackmun of Roe v Wade:
... "If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment."... "for we there would not have indulged in statutory interpretation favorable to abortion in specified circumstances if the necessary consequence was the termination of life entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection." H Blackmun Roe v Wade.
A woman’s right to abort was base completely upon the Fairy Tale that Life begins after birth and no sooner. This erroneous conclusion that the fetus was not human life has been proven wrong. The issue of Bodily Autonomy is trumped by equal rights and the 14th Amendment rights and it is only a matter of time for Roe to be overturned..
An honest person has to admit that they don't know *for sure* that a given pregnancy is safe.
And while I have the right to take chances with my own life, I do not have the right to take chances with someone elses' life.
Can you imagine what a horrible job it would be to be the guy the GOP puts in charge of granting abortion waivers? Knowing that every time you say "no" you could be condemning an innocent woman to death or disfigurement?
Imagine that is your job and today is the day the odds caught up with you. Today is the day someone you refused dies.
Her family wants very much to talk to you.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362478/
I think both sides of this debate should agree that stopping unwanted pregnancies is a good goal. Fighting over the means to that goal is foolish. Multiple means can work together. In the meantime, maybe we should ere on the side of caution on the subject of terminating pregnancies.
The argument over abortion centers on the following question: At what point are we endowed with the right to life? One extreme viewpoint is that the right begins at conceptionÂ.
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Actually that isn't the question at all. That is a big fancy distraction from the real question.
The right to life and the right to bodily autonomy are both fundamental rights. There are MANY cases where they come into conflict. As a society we have decided hands down that the right to bodily autonomy is the more fundamental of the two and when they come into conflict bodily autonomy wins.
Which means that ****even if you grant fetal-me the same right to life that adult-me has that doesn't entitle fetal-me to the flesh of another because adult-me is not so entitled****. This isn't a question of fetal equality. I can grant fetal equality and still support abortion-on-demand because NOBODY IS ENTITLED TO ANOTHER PERSON'S FLESH. The Right to Life doesn't change that.
Here are some examples of how bodily autonomy trumps the right to life.
1) We allow capital punishment of prisoners but we don't allow medical experimentation on them or forced organ donation from them.
2) We let tens of thousands of born people die every year rather than force other people to be living donors of what they need.
3) We let people die rather than use flesh from the body of a non-organ donor to save them.
1 - Fetal Superiority - Giving fetus's a right that no other person has - the right to take unwilling flesh to sustain their own lives.
2 - Maternal Inferiority - Declaring that upon becoming pregnant a woman surrenders several fundamental rights and becomes sub-human. Even the corpse of a real person would then be accorded more rights than a living pregnant women.
As a society we have decided hands down that the right to bodily autonomy is the more fundamentaÂl of the two and when they come into conflict bodily autonomy wins.
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Nope, you cannot smoke in public because my Bodily Autonomy right to not smoke is greater than your Bodily Autonomy right to smoke. You cannot have sex in public, because your Bodily Autonomy right to copulate infringes upon the public right to not witness it. You cannot kill yourself, or prostitute yourself or take illegal drugs, etc etc.etc... Bodily Autonomy is limited by others rights.
1) Capital punishment is the Greatest violation of Bodily Autonomy possible, it takes the life from the body of another person. Bodily Autonomy is not absolute.
2) Those who need organs, cannot infring upon the rights of those who want to keep their organs. In the same way a mother cannot take the life of the unborn without consent or due process.
3) Same as above
I gave you not one but THREE examples of our moral, ethical, and legal systems declaring that bodily autonomy is supreme and you have provided me not one example of our government violating the flesh of one person to save another.
Not one. To even begin to make the argument you need at least three to match my examples and you can't even scratch up one.
Heck, here is another helping of reality.
http://www.taph.com/biomedical-tissue-services/michael-mastromarino-pleads-guilty-in-us-body-snatchers-case-2.html
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Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes described in detail at the time the four were charged how they allegedly replaced the bones of their victims with lengths of piping to avoid arousing suspicion at the victims' funerals.
According to the indictment, the team forged death certificates and donor consent forms to create the appearance that the tissue was harvested legally.
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In the real world, we sentence people to 18 years in prison for stealing life-saving tissue from the dead.
Nobody says that people on the kidney donor waiting list aren't people.
Nobody says that people on the kidney donor waiting list don't have a right to life
But these things don't entitle you to the flesh of another. Not even from their corpse.
Women > corpses.
My body is mine, mine, mine. See I have a greed is good moment.
You pick up the pen.
What do you write? Assuming you aren't completely insane and acknowledge that exceptions for mortality risk and rape are valid and necessary to keep from turning our country into a charnal pit of maternal torture and murder there is still the minor matter of codifying how these exceptions are to be handled.
Lets start with the easy one. Rape. When someone is raped they can get an abortion. Easy, right? Um well ... what if she's just *saying* she got raped to get the exemption? Wouldn't be much progress for theocracy if anyone who wanted could just cry "rape" and get around you. A court conviction, meanwhile, takes way to long to get. Assuming you get it. Innocent until proven guilty means that some guilty people get off the hook. So how, exactly, do you figure out a way to make sure the women who were actually raped are identified in a timely manner?
OK this is harder than we thought, lets do the medical exemptions instead. Cause Doctors are all knowing, all seeing, and 100% accurate in their opinions about which pregnancies are dangerous ... right?
For years they've prevented birth control, family planning & abortion advice in various US funded foreign aid programs including those run by NGOs!
The defunding is not new, neither is the Hyde amendment that penalizes the poor at home & abroad for not being rich enough to afford birth control devices & medications.
When some Republicans want to reduce healthcare specifically for women, yes.
When some Republicans want to reduce support for single mothers, yes.
When some Republicans want to force date-raped women to bear their attacker's babies, yes.
When some Republicans want these things, they impose legal burdens on women that men do not suffer for committing the same acts. They ARE against women's rights.