Surely you have heard that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted to reinstate the Global Gag Rule that prevents any family planning agencies that provide information about abortion service from receiving any U.S. foreign aid.
Who gets hurt? Women, children and anyone who believes the conversation about women's issues needs to move forward.
But once again, that conversation has been hijacked by the right-wing strategy to frame deeper issues related to women and families in terms of a women's right to choose. For a refresher, let's look at the vote by Michele Bachmann and others on the right to defund Planned Parenthood -- even though abortions only make up 10 percent of the services it provides to women without other means of health care, and that abortion services receive no federal funding. As we wrote before:
I know of one woman, in fact, whose life may have been saved by Planned Parenthood. She discovered a lump in her breast shortly after losing her work-related health insurance. Where did she turn for a mammogram? Yep, Planned Parenthood, which ultimately shepherded her through the scary process of not only the diagnostics, but ultimately surgery, chemo and radiation.
The global gag rule -- first instated by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, rescinded by President Bill Clinton in 1993, re-imposed by President George W. Bush in 2001, and rescinded again by President Barack Obama in 2009 -- prevents U.S. family planning assistance from going to organizations that perform or provide information about or referrals to legal abortion services. What's more, organizations that receive funds cannot use their own money to provide abortion-related information or services, or advocate for liberalized abortion laws. The rule imposes no similar restrictions on advocacy against such laws. When in force, the global gag rule comes on top of the Helms amendment, the 1973 law that prohibits direct U.S. funding of abortions overseas.Under the global gag rule, these organizations face a choice: either participate in the American right's global campaign to restrict women's rights and access to reproductive health care or lose critical U.S. funding.
And there is clear evidence that access to family planning improves women's health and overall well-being. Maternal mortality rates see significant reductions when women can control the timing and spacing of their pregnancies. Access to family planning can help women avoid the pregnancy-related complications some 15 million women confront every year. And when women have the resources to control their fertility, they can take advantage of educational and economic opportunities that benefit not only women but their families and communities as well.
But what makes us even more angry is the way the debate on abortion sucks the energy out of the fight for a better world for women and children -- here and abroad. Suddenly, regardless of where we stand on a women's right to choose, we're in a defensive position.
And that's important because it means they control the conversation. Our attention spans are shorter, we live in a soundbyte society, and so there's no room for nuanced discussion. Point, counterpoint. And when we're on the defensive, there's no space to speak to other issues, let alone attempt to reframe the whole conversation.
We're gagged, in more ways than one.
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Jon O'Brien: Catholic Women And Contraception: It's Beyond Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Too bad the battle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie must be waged before this will even be a possibility.
Americans may thinkthat we practice democracy, but our choice are so constrained & arrangened that there is no real choice anywhere in the system. The candidates are preselected by the media many months before the elections. The primaries are control by the media and money, so that they nominations are usually decided long before all but a tiny minority of people ever vote, even in the primaries. And then these elections between two peas from opposite ends of the same pod are offered up as some sort of real choice.
So, why should abortion be different? Why should women be allowed to control their own bodies? Few have those options in any other issue of control. Just look at the big picture. Woman in the country are suffering from breast cancer at epidemic rates. Instread of getting alarmed, women have been conditioned to think of breast cancer as a normal part of adult life.
As we watch the social safety net being dismantled, we need to be asking the broader questions about what is really occurring.
Restricting abortion is not about oppressing women and half of women stand along side more than half of men in being against abortion. Abortion just isn't popular with the American people.
There are so many variables that "one sizs fits all" mentality just doesn't cut it. The only part that makes sense to me is that it should not be used in lieu of birth control because there are many ways to achieve that without resorting to abortion. The rest of the choices should be up to the women, whose body we are discussing about as if it was a commodity.
And it is just as important to educate men about birth control and STD prevention,. For too long, all the responsibility has fallen on women who, in many countries, do not have control over their own actions--their husbands/fathers/brothers do.
If men got pregnant abortion would be free.
To that I'll add: If men nursed children and cared for them and sacrificed for them the way women do, because of their biology and hormones, the way women MUST, there would be no more child poverty. There would be no more wars.
The whole controversy over reproductive rights is nothing more than men trying to maintain gender and tribal dominance by controlling not only their women, but everyone else's women.
Ladies, time to step up and take the reins.
Few men think and feel with the Machiavellian impetus to control that you ascribe to them as a group--no more so than any single woman does.
Do men become emotionally divorced from care-giving? It's worth considering; but this is not because men belong to some great cabal intent on world domination--it's owing to how men as primary material providers have historically had to over-commit to the work world in order to support their families (something women were very much in favor of). While expedient from an evolutionary standpoint, today we can have more choice if culturally we are more able to support that.
Recognition of those factors is going to do much more than saying things like, "If men cared for [children] and sacrificed..." Many men *do* sacrifice for their families, and often become alienated from them in the process--while all the while receiving little understanding that helps change the status quo. Statements like yours above only feed that alienation.
Change is a responsibility of both men and women, and necessitates a real grasp of the issues--not an Us/Them, Oppressor/Oppressed mentality.
Touche, Lemur. You got me.
We need to provide reproductive education to both men and women along with birth control. They need to know that children are not just something that happens to them, but that they can plan their families. Women in developing countries who have control over their own reproduction tend to have fewer children who are better fed, better educated, healthier, and more likely to rise out of poverty.
create a doppelganger of Sharia Law called Republican Rule. Sex licenses will be issued in due course. But until qualifying tests can be organized, please wear learner plates when operating the relevant apparatus unsupervised.
"a women's right to choose"
not to have rights?
"The Global Gag Rule has"
come about completely by accident. When the inexpertly tied cloth, covering Michele’s eyes, slipped down over a permanently open mouth.
"these organizations face a choice"
sit back in a silence imposed by the minority. Or press for a referendum, on the introduction of real democracy. i.e. Rule by the majority.
"Like clean water?"
Then you’ll hate f**king fracking.
"No brainer, right?"
Yes, Bachmann wrong.
"they control the conversation"
until the roar for a referendum effectively drowns them out.
"more ways than one"
to skin a cataphatic
Just thought you might enjoy this article:
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/25/new-saudi-fatwa-defends-pedophilia-as-%E2%80%98marriage%E2%80%99/
Good point fanned you.
:-)
This has to go through a Democratically controlled Senate (granted, not all Dems are pro-choice), and be signed by the President.
Obama could veto it, or sign it and kill it dead with a (gasp!) Signing Statement.
This article is not very well written.
Also, just to clarify, I don't believe that every person on Welfare keep's having baby's to stay on it. There are MANY other reasons people need these services as well as Planned Parenthood.
They do it BECAUSE they know it's an impossible situation. They paint women into such a tight corner that there are almost no reproductive decisions a woman can make on her own.
In the Republican Theological God-Is-Money Bizzarro World only well-educated, happily married, financially secure Christian church-going women deserve to bear and rear children. Oh...and have sex.
Now the Republican men----they get to do whatever the H they want. As long as nobody finds out.
Especially the sinful Democrats!
http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx
The Gallop Poll showing women statistics is towards the bottom