Does Ignoring Trans People Make Your Point Look Bigger?
This past year access to hormonal birth control has become a major political issue. Many insurance companies exclude birth control from their plans and a large political movement has been fighting to make such discriminatory practices illegal.
Those same insurance companies also discriminatorily exclude access to hormone replacement therapy for trans people, but unfortunately there has been comparatively very little movement to end that discrimination.
As conservatives push towards making hormonal birth control illegal, you can bet such an outcome would impact trans women as well, as the hormone pills we take are made from the same synthesized hormones, just in different doses.
As conservatives seek to defund Planned Parenthood and shut down clinics that offer abortion in the struggle over reproductive rights, it increasingly puts access to basic services at risk. Just as cis women seek services at these clinics unrelated to abortion, so do trans women. In fact, in some areas Planned Parenthood is one of the only service providers willing to prescribe hormones and related care for trans people. (In other areas Planned Parenthood refuses services to us for being trans, but that’s another issue).
So it is true that I will never have personal need for an abortion. However, I have relied on Planned Parenthood and other women’s clinics. I have lobbied my state legislature for insurance coverage of birth control. I have lobbied city governments to adopt insurance plans for their own employees that cover hormones for trans people. I have personally been sterilized because the government demanded it (a requirement my birth state of California rescinded just this last year). And I continue to fight for access to women’s health care - both cis women and trans women.
Inclusion is important. #thatisall
Remember the scandal over Janet Jackson’s boob during the Super Bowl?
Super Bowl Viewers Will See Graphic Anti-Abortion Ads With Pictures Of Bloody Fetuses
christianist propaganda is OK but cock and pussy is obscene. welcome to Amerikkka.
(Source: thetart)
A Forced Eugenics Survivor Speaks Her Truth
This is why the pro-life movement’s sudden concern for Black fetuses and it’s recent focus on the Black community is laughable, insulting, hypocritical, and downright racist.
(via squeetothegee)
After the Cult of The Fetus targeted me for sharing my story about the abortion I noticed that many of the same people attacking me for making the choice that saved my life didn’t give a damn about my two existing children. Apparently my actual responsibilities as a mother stop as soon as a child leaves my womb alive. Then again I have two sons & we all know the value placed on the lives of young black men.
(via karnythia)
this, forever.
(Source: thetart)
Let me tell you some things.
I used to investigate child abuse and neglect. I can tell you how to stop the vast majority of abortion in the world.
First, make knowledge and access to contraception widely available. Start teaching kids before they hit puberty. Teach them about domestic violence and coercion, and teach them not to coerce and rape. Create a strong, loving community where women and girls feel safe and supported in times of need. Because guess what? They aren’t. You know what happens to babies born under such circumstances? They get hurt, unnecessarily. They get sick, unnecessarily. They get removed from parents who love them but who are unprepared for the burden of a child. Resources? Honey, we try. There aren’t enough resources anywhere. There are waiting lists, and promises, and maybes. If the government itself can’t hook people up, what makes you think an impoverished single mom can handle it?
Abolish poverty. Do you have any idea how much childcare costs? Daycare can cost as much or more than monthly rent. They may be inadequately staffed. Getting a private nanny is a nice idea, but they don’t come cheap either. Relatives? Do they own a car? Does the bus run at the right times? Do they have jobs of their own they need to work just to keep the lights on? Are they going to stick around until you get off you convenience store shift at 4 AM? Do they have criminal histories that will make them unsuitable as caregivers when CPS pokes around? You gonna pay for that? Who’s going to pay for that?
End rape. I know your type errs on the side of blaming the woman, but I’ve seen little girls who’ve barely gotten their periods pregnant because somebody thought raping preteens was an awesome idea. You want to put a child through that? Or someone with a mental or physical inability for whom pregnancy would be frightening, painful or even life-threatening? I’ve seen nonverbal kids who had their feet sliced up by caregivers for no fucking reason at all, you think sexual abuse doesn’t happen either?
You say there’s lots of couples who want to adopt. Kiddo, what they want to adopt are healthy white babies, preferably untainted by the wombs and genetics of women with alcohol or drug dependencies. I’ve seen the kids they don’t want, who almost no one wants. You people focus only on the happy pink babies, the gigglers, the ones who grow and grow with no trouble. Those are not the kids who linger in foster care. Those are certainly not the older kids and teenagers who age out of foster care and then are thrown out in the streets, usually with an array of medical and mental health issues. Are they too old to count?
And yeah, I’ve seen the babies, little hand-sized things barely clinging to life. There’s no glory, no wonder there. There is no wonder in a pregnant woman with five dollars to her name, so deep in depression you wonder if she’ll be alive in a week. Therapy costs money. Medicine costs money. Food, clothes, electricity cost money. Government assistance is a pittance; poverty drives women and girls into situations where they are forced to rely on people who abuse them to survive. (I’ve been up in more hospitals than I can count.)
In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom $50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician. I ain’t never seen them sitting up for hours with an autistic child who screams and rages so his mother can get some sleep while she rests up from working 14-hour days. I don’t see them fixing leaks in rundown houses or playing with a kid while the police prepare to interview her about her sexual abuse. They’re not paying for the funerals of babies and children who died after birth, when they truly do become independent organisms. And the crazy thing is they think they’ve already done their job, because the child was born!
Aphids give birth, girl. It’s no miracle. You want to speak for the weak? Get off your high horse and get your hands dirty helping the poor, the isolated, the ill and mentally ill women and mothers and their children who already breathe the dirty air. You are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for children. You don’t have a flea’s comprehension of injustice. You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage?
“Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.
”STFU, Conservatives: When I say I’m pro-life…
This is perfect.
(via mis-anthrop-ologie)
And I mean, I believe in stuff like this.
(via freudianflips)
Well, this made me tear up this morning.
(via tastiejam)
Realest thing to ever grace my dash
(via southerntellect)
Culture War in Kansas--Reproductive Justice, Clinic Defense
i can’t get into a lot of stuff about the anti’s and what not most times. i just can’t stand those motherfuckers. it is true that abortion providers have bullet proof vests. we hade bullet proof glass at my last clinic and there were evacuation drills where we practice locking down and securing patients etc. so it is a war climate when it should be a health care providing climate (it is that, but there is the constant threat)
i just wanted to put this story about Kansas on your radar. Dr. Tiller was murdered there and supposedly the state is run by right wing tea party types that are encouraging lack of access and emboldening the violent fringes.
what happens, because abortion is so divisive is people want it to go away like the NOW person said. i’m for holistic health and justice and i get tired of the ‘choice’ debate. what am i saying? i’m saying i can’t stand that people won’t leave folks terminating their pregnancies or the people who provide services alone. and the fringe elements gain ground here, because people want to avoid the topic.
for example the ‘black is beautiful’ ad’s in Oakland directly affect the ability of new planned parenthood affiliates to open in Oakland. i was just speaking with someone who said they want to open one in fruitvale and are having a hard time getting support from the neighborhood. that might make sense on so many levels given the history of eugenics enacted on communities of color. that history needs to be examined by providers carefully, for sure. but then you have the ‘anti’s’ exploiting that feeling and at the end of the day support for clinics is so small, because noone wants to deal with the risk associated with fringe and violent anti-abortion types.
this doesn’t make much sense. just support abortion providers always if you get the chance because they’re literally and figuratively under fire.
Deoliver47: Dying to give birth
Pregnancy can kill you - especially if you are a black woman in the US.
The PBS Newshour covered a recently released report which gives the details.
Report: African-American Women at Higher Risk for Maternal Death in Calif.
In California, African-American women are dying of pregnancy related-causes at rates seen in some developing countries, and at four times the rate of white women and other ethnic groups in the state.A new report from the California Department of Public Health reveals the stark disparity: the mortality rate for black women was 46 deaths for every 100,000 live births from 2006 to 2008, while the rates for Asian, white and Hispanic women in the same period ranged from 9 to 13 deaths per 100,000 births.
“African-American people generally have worse health outcomes than Caucasian people…but not to this degree, not four-fold,” said Conrad Chao, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the report. “What surprised me when we got through the numbers was the magnitude of the disparity.”A 2007 Centers for Disease Control national breakdown showed a similar — but smaller— race gap, with black women at about three times the risk for maternal death as white women. Taken as a community, African-American women in California have a maternal mortality risk comparable to rates in Kazakhstan and Syria, according to World Health Organization data.
I was not surprised by these data.
I was all too familiar with them, since as a graduate student I worked on a study of infant mortality and pre-term delivery in Harlem conducted by medical anthropologist Dr. Leith Mullings (wife of the recently deceased Manning Marable) in Central Harlem which began in 1993:
Resistance and Resilience: The Sojourner Syndrome and the Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem and Stress and Resilience: The Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem
Leith and her co-author Alika Wali pointed to racism as a co-factor/stressor which is difficult to measure.
Recently several blogs in the Afro-sphere have covered this aspect - reported in the Seattle Times:
Black women remain significantly more likely to lose a baby in the first year of life than white women across education, wealth and other factors. And the alarming fact remains a medical mystery. The Seattle Times reports the following staggering statistics:*A college-educated black woman in the United States is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with only a high school education..
*A black woman who does not smoke has worse birth outcomes than a white woman who smokes.
*An African-American woman who starts prenatal care in her first trimester is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with late or no prenatal care.
*As infant mortality declines, the gap between black and white women does not.
“Race in America puts your pregnancy at risk,” says Ilise Zimmerman, CEO of the Northern New Jersey Maternal-Child Health Consortium, according to the Times. “It’s not about poverty. It’s not about teenage pregnancy. It’s not about use of drugs. If you self-identify as black, there’s a greater chance your baby will be born before full term and be too small.”
After a discussion in this CA report detailing a long list of possible co-factors, they were still unable to put a finger on one root cause of these appalling statistics.
Mother Jones had this to say:
The authors of the report are still not sure exactly why African-American women are four times as likely to die than women of other races, but they suspect a combination of higher obesity rates, lower use of prenatal health care, less adequate care, and various risk factors as a result of lower socioeconomic status (e.g. higher stress). But the authors still seemed to be scratching their heads about how one ethnic group could make up only 6% of all California births, but 22% of maternal deaths.Another anomaly: although Hispanics overall account for 51% of all California births, foreign-born Hispanics had much better health than those born in the US. “Immigrant Hispanics tend to have better health than the average American population, in spite of what their aggregate socioeconomic indicators would predict,” write the study’s authors. It could be because foreign-born women give birth at younger ages, when they are less likely to encounter complications. Or it could simply be that the American lifestyle, and health care system, is so unhealthy that it’s actually a liability. The high Cesarean rate, which accounts for a third of all births, in particular, is directly related to maternal mortality. And then there’s the question of care, and of cost. Only 22% of people with health insurance in California (the report says) have coverage for maternity services: In 2004, 82% of them did. For those who can’t get, or can’t afford, private health insurance, there’s Medi-Cal, which paid for 47% of all prenatal and pregnancy-related costs in 2008. An especially interesting tidbit found in the report is that 7% of women in Medi-Cal’s maternity program actually HAVE private insurance: their insurance just doesn’t cover maternal services.
There’s something seriously wrong when your health insurer doesn’t cover your prenatal care. Maybe this could be a new torch for the pro-life movement, or a larger one for the pro-choicers. It seems like a perfect platform for a “family values” Republican, no?
Though these data, I am reporting on today are focused on African American women, there are many health care disparities that affect other women of color. What is important for us, as activists to recognize as we address health care that these data are not simply a product of social class.
So AA sisters have a much higher chance to die while giving birth, and we have a higher chance of losing the baby. And now Republican Teahadists would love to cut us out of the access to family planning and the insufficient pre-and post natal care we have, as they increase their racist attacks.
The disparities in health care for black, latina, native american and asian women have now become part of a grassroots movement. Women of color and their allies have been organizing under the banner of “Reproductive Justice”
Reproductive Justice is not simply a matter of abortion.
Proponents of the concept of reproductive justice aim to recognize that women’s reproductive health is connected to and affected by conditions in their lives that are shaped by their socioeconomic status, human rights violations, race, sexuality, and nationality. Proponents argue that women cannot have full control over their reproductive lives, unless issues such as socioeconomic disadvantage, racial discrimination, inequalities in wealth and power, and differential access to resources and services are addressed. The grassroots organization Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice defines reproductive justice as follows: “We believe reproductive justice is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families, and our communities in all areas of our lives.”According to SisterSong, reproductive justice has five primary characteristics:
Defines the primary problem as Reproductive Oppression
Uses an intersectional analysis
Is based on worldview focused on human rights
Links individuals to their communities
Uses organizing and advocacy to work on institutional changeReproductive justice will be achieved when Indigenous women and women of color have the power to:
protect and advance our human rights;
determine the number and spacing of our children;
protect our bodily integrity;
protect our right to parent our children;
improve the quality of the environment in which we live,
obtain the necessary social supports to live healthy lives in healthy families, and in safe and sustainable communities.
Reproductive Justice ensures that a mother can have children, live through the delivery, or choose not to be pregnant. Reproductive Justice ensures pre-and post natal care, child-care, healthy food and environmentally safe shelter for families.
What can you do?
Support SisterSong and other organizations in the Reproductive Justice Movement.
Thank you for reading.
